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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 



THE GREAT APPEAL 



By JAMES G. K. McCLURE 

Just Published 
THE GREAT APPEAL 

I2MO, CLOTH, GILT TOP, 75 CENTS 



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This cheering, inspiring message appeals to all that is 
noblest and best in the young heart. It swarms with illustra- 
tions and examples of humanity's helpers. — The Evangelical 

The thoughts presented in these few pages may well prove 
an inspiration to many to place themselves on the side of the 
world's helpers. — Observer 

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By all means let our young men and women read this volume. 
It will stir up within them and stimulate many a good purpose, 
and help them in the all -important process of making some- 
thing worth while of themselves. — The Observer 

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of its simplicity. — The Outlook 

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leaves one with an increased appreciation of the dignity of man 
as a creature of infinite possibilities. — Christian Evangelist 



FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

Publishers 



THE GREAT APPEAL 






JAMES G»K. McCLURE 

PRESIDENT OF LAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY 




CHICAGO NEW YORK TORONTO 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

MDCCCXCIX 
A. 



'\ 







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Copyright, 1899 
By FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



TWOCl^^ « >. nSCHIVEO. 




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The Library 
OF Gondii ESS 



WASHiPrairc^ 



A Word of Preparation 

The desire of God is toward the children 
of men. That desire broods over human 
lives and seeks a happy, cordial relation 
between them and God. It even expresses 
itself in an appeal to them to come into 
blessed fellowship with Himself. It is that 
appeal, in several of its declarations, that 
is set forth in the following pages. No 
one page exhausts that appeal nor fully 
portrays it. It is the book as a whole that 
attempts to indicate the nature and the 
extent of that appeal. 

The writer realizes that while he dis- 
tributes the different parts of the human 
spirit as though each occupied a place 
entirely by itself, the fact is that the human 
spirit is a unit, and all its parts are inter- 
related, each part operating in connection 
with every other part, and no one part 
being uninfluenced by the others. 
5 



A Word of Preparation 

May this book bring to every reader the 
question, "What more could God have done 
that He has not done to draw me to Him- 
self?'* And may it also lead every reader 
to answer to God's appeal with the dedica- 
tion of his life to the service and the joys 
of God. 

James G. K. McClure. 

Lake Forest, 111. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 



I. The Appeal to the Intellect, 9 

II. The Appeal to the Heart, . 28 

III. The Appeal to the Conscience, 44 

IV. The Appeal to the Memory, . 61 

V. The Appeal to the Imagination, 79 

VI. The Appeal to the Self-Inter- 

ESTS, . ... 97 

VII. The Appeal to the Will, . 115 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

In all the earth there is nothing so won- 
derful as the human mind. The first ex- 
pressions of that mind, in a little child, 
startle and interest us; the final expressions 
of that mind, in the wisest sage, astound 
and enthrall us. The mere machinery 
itself of the mind is amazing; the product 
furnished by that machinery is still more 
amazing. 

It is this intellectual faculty wherewith 
we know, reason, and pass judgment, that 
works all the marvels of progress, trans- 
forming rudeness into refinement and con- 
fusion into order. The intellect writes 
the verses that inspire to heroism, paints 
the canvases that are admired for a thou- 
sand years, spans rivers, unites continents, 
and even climbs above the clouds. The 
educated traveler, in the heart of Africa, 
cuts lines upon a chip and handing the chip 
to an untaught barbarian bids him carry it 
to a distant friend. The friend sends back 



The Great Appeal 

the articles that the chip's lines call for, 
and the barbarian stands aghast before 
'*the chip that can talk." 

But what a display of intellect, as com- 
pared to *'the chip that can talk," is seen 
when Michael Angelo plans and erects 
such a building as St. Peter's Church at 
Rome, with all its magnitude and all its 
delicacy, all its painting and all its sculp- 
ture! When Champollion takes the figures 
of birds, beetles, and twisted forms painted 
upon the walls of Egyptian tombs, and by 
sheer mental force constructs a key that 
unlocks the mystery of them all, and thus 
reduces them to a language! When the 
secrets of electricity are brought out of 
the hiding-places where they have been 
undiscovered for centuries, and are laid at 
our feet for use so that we can speak in 
intelligible words around the whole earth 
in small moments of time! When a star is 
detected whose light requires hundreds of 
years to reach our eyes, and we can study 
its place and its motion! 

In view of what the intellect can do, 
seeing straight through mountains that are 
miles in thickness, and healing diseases 
that have always been incurable, it is not 
surprising that there is such a thing as 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

*'pride of intellect." A mind that can 
accumulate great ' reservoirs of historic 
knowledge so as to be an encyclopaedia in 
information; that can read and even speak 
the languages of a score of diverse nations; 
that is so disciplined, alert, ready, that it 
fears no question of business nor of military 
campaign, no problem of scientific nor of 
philosophic investigation, is indeed an 
object of wonderment to its possessor and 
of wonderment to others. People of all 
races have paid homage to mind. Because 
Demosthenes could speak such stirring 
words as roused the populace from lethargy 
to valorous action, and because Pericles 
could surmount the Acropolis with such a 
Parthenon as enraptured men in all ages, 
Greece reverenced Demosthenes and 
Pericles as her permanent heroes. Phys- 
ical force impresses a few onlookers for the 
time: mental force impresses vast multi- 
tudes for all time. Material wealth has a 
glitter in its day, but its day is brief; men- 
tal wealth shines on forever. History de- 
votes ten lines to the mere millionaire, if it 
mentions him at all, while it devotes a hun- 
dred lines to the intellectual giant whom it 
is its delight to mention. 

It is to this intellect in man, this know- 



The Great Appeal 

ing, reasoning, judging faculty, that God 
first addresses Himself in all His intercourse 
with man. The assertion that God*s reli- 
gion is a thing of feeling and fancies, a 
mere sentimentality with which the mind, 
the reason, the discriminating judgment 
have nothing whatever to do, is made with- 
out reference to the true facts of the case. 
The true facts are that the heart is never 
asked to worship "while the brain denies*' ; 
nor is the heart ever asked ''to strangle 
reason that faith may be able to believe.'' 
Rather is it the case, that every precept and 
every instruction are presented first and 
directly to man's intellect; and it is on the 
basis of man's rationality and of the 
thought-workings of that rationality that 
God unvaryingly appeals to man for obedi- 
ence and service. Ignorance in man is a 
hindrance, not a help to God in drawing 
nigh to man. The more intellect a man 
has the more God expects His appeal to 
reach and impress him. God can and does 
speak intelligibly to the weakest intellect; 
He has words and facts that He can use in 
talking with the youngest child. But the 
stronger the intellect, the larger the words 
and the stouter the facts He presents, and 
He looks to Humboldt to trust in Him as 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

much — yes, more — than He looks to Joan 
of Arc. 

The presence of this appeal by God to 
the intellect is in contrast with the absence 
of appeal by pagan deities to the intellect. 
Much of every idolatrous religion is recog- 
nized by its very advocates to be false and 
inadequate. Lying imposition eventually 
breaks down when men become discrimi- 
nating: acute intellects are sure to puncture 
the veil of deceit. Paganism, therefore, 
makes no essential appeal to the intellect, 
because no man can be a wise man, a man 
of information and of keen reasoning pow- 
er, and still give unqualified allegiance to 
what is false and insufficient. He may 
believe that it is best to leave the religion 
of his race unchallenged before the public, 
fearing lest his race shall become wholly 
irreverent and lawless if the restraints of 
their religion are withdrawn ; but he him- 
self will not and cannot be persuaded to 
believe the lie. He avers that it is the 
province of the intellect to scrutinize every 
religion, whatever name it may bear or in 
whatever clime it may originate, and then 
after scrutiny to pronounce upon it and 
assert whether it is worthy or unworthy in 
the estimation of the intellect. 
13 



The Great Appeal 

Even those statements of religion that 
claim to express the appeal of God Himself 
need to be studied with the keenest intel- 
lectuality. There is, it is true, but one 
Bible, one '*word of God written"; but 
the phrases of that Bible have been mis- 
quoted and misused until in many instances 
they have been made to misrepresent the 
appeal of God. When in the early cen- 
turies the attempt prevailed to marry Chris- 
tianity and pagan religions, preserving 
Christian names while retaining ideas that 
were precious to paganism, the marriage 
compromised Christianity and associated 
with it teachings that have no sanction from 
the God of Scripture. This man-made 
system, thus contrived, does not represent 
God*s appeal; God never requires a blind 
allegiance to any mummery, to any priest- 
hood, to any church. No one is to hand 
over his religion to another whom he con- 
siders to be less intellectual in religious 
penetration than himself. Flaws in argu- 
ments and breaks in logical processes are 
to be noted, not disregarded, whoever 
makes them and wherever they are made. 
Non-essentials are not essentials, and are 
not to be received as such. If an angel 
teach a different word than that of God 

H 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

Himself, it is not God's appeal, and no one 
is asked by God to receive it. God's ap- 
peal has nothing whatever to do with hun- 
dreds of the matters that cause what are 
called ''the denominational distinctions of 
Christendom. " God would have the intel- 
lect brush them all aside as creations of 
time and not of eternity, as not from Him, 
and would have the intellect fasten its 
vision on His single appeal, to accept Him 
as King and receive Him as Friend. 

When God makes His own appeal to 
man's intellect He does so first, through 
nature. Before the child is able to read 
the writing of man, God confronts him 
with the material creation. God spreads 
abroad the heavens, marshals sun, moon, 
and stars in their procession, breaks 
courses for rivers, places bounds to the sea, 
orders the recurrence of the seasons. He 
causes all these forms of nature to be seen 
and noticed by the child. 

Straightway the child in his mind begins 
to ask the questions: ''Who made the moon 
and sea?" "Where did they come from?" 
The mind is thus summoned to a course of 
investigation, and summoned, if possible, 
through such investigation to find an answer 
to its questions. 

15 



The Great Appeal 

That answer can be obtained only through 
an intellectual process. To this end, that 
we may obtain the answer, God bids us ex- 
haust every resource of investigation, to 
observe, to analyze, to compare. He calls 
attention to the beauty of nature, as He 
shows the mind the flower of the field and 
the sunset cloud of the sky. He asks the 
mind to note the order of nature, as the 
centuries move on and still the planets keep 
their motion and the earth swings securely 
about the sun. He directs attention^to the 
adaptatio7i of nature, as the bird is found to 
be equipped for movement through air and 
the fish for movement through water. He 
causes the intellect to heed the extent of 
nature, as the microscope finds infinitesimal 
molecular life and the telescope detects the 
stars hidden millions of miles away in the 
depths of seemingly infinite space. He 
asks that the force of nature be pondered, 
as the cyclone crashes through forests and 
through city, and the lightning splinters 
the loftiest oak. 

The more we know of nature the more 
its wonders, beauties, energies impress us; 
the more we know of it the more earnestly 
it speaks, and forces the question, ''Whose 
handiwork is this?" Investigation into 
i6 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

nature's laws often explains a phenomenon 
and makes clear a mystery. But every 
explained phenomenon only widens the 
domain of the unexplained; the ocean 
grows broader as we move away from the 
shore. The little grove at Delphi that 
investigated would reveal all secrets, be- 
comes, as we press into it, a limitless for- 
est whose borders only have been skirted 
and whose depths no one seems capable of 
penetrating. Science makes nature greater 
every new year. Each newly discovered 
force, each newly discovered law declares 
the more impressively the glory and the 
grandeur of nature. Nature is vast, nature 
is tremendous, nature is well-nigh omnip- 
otent, and is certainly exhaustless. 

Placing Himself beside man, underneath 
nature's heavens and amid all the objects 
those heavens look down upon, the God of 
nature speaks to man, and says: *'Lift 
up your eyes on high and see! Who hath 
created these things?" ''Yes, who hath 
created them?" man's mind answers back, 
a very echo of the question put by God. 
Then God declares who hath created them: 
*'I that bringeth out their hosts by number, 
I that calleth them all by names, the ever- 
lasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the 

17 



\/ 



The Great Appeal 

ends of the earth, who giveth power to the 
faint, and to them that have no might 
increaseth strength, even I created these 
things; and I ask you in your weakness to 
wait upon my might as helplessness waits 
upon power, and to let my resources be 
your protection." 

Thus having spoken to the intellect 
through nature, God proceeds to speak to 
the intellect through Scripture. His reli- 
gion is distinctively and peculiarly a book- 
religion. Other religions have their sacred 
books, but those books are brief and dis- 
jointed compared to the Bible, with its 
* 'great extent, immense variety, and 
organic connection.*' Each and every 
part of the Bible is addressed directly to 
man's mind. The first sentence in it is an 
answer to the first question asked by the 
intellect as it looks on nature and wonder- 
ingly queries who made the heavens and 
the earth: ''God created the heavens and 
the earth." Beginning with that first 
statement. Scripture straightway proceeds 
to show forth God's power, God's wisdom, 
and God's goodness; and then, having 
declared the worthy character of the God 
of nature, and having declared, too, His 
providence in all the affairs of men, calls, 
i8 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

page by page through all its record, to the 
mind of man to consider the blessedness of 
obedience to His will, and the sorrow of 
disobedience. It never asks for faith, 
except on the basis of information already 
given. If God charges Abraham to leave 
his native land and go out he knoweth not 
whither. He charges this on the ground 
that Abraham already knows God to be so 
wise and good that only a wise and good 
command ever could emanate from Him. 

The province of faith always is to rest 
its feet upon known facts. Faith is never 
to be senseless nor unintelligent. No man 
can exercise Scriptural faith except as he 
is a thinker. Evidence is to be examined; 
proofs to be weighed. God never requires 
us to do anything that is unreasonable. 
We may not at the moment see the benefit 
that will result to ourselves or to others 
from obedience to His will in some special 
matter; but He never asks us to be obedi- 
ent until after He has assured us, and 
shown us, that His will is perfect. That a 
matter appears to be beyond reason does 
not make it contrary to reason. We are 
never charged by God to accept the man- 
made philosophies that are alleged deduc- 
tions from Scripture, nor are any special 

19 



The Great Appeal 

formulas concerning God's justice, or even 
concerning Christ's atonement, singled out 
by Him and made mandatory upon our con- 
victions. Such philosophies and formulas 
may have been helpful to the welfare of 
God's religion in the centuries; but hurt- 
ful or helpful, they are not made of the 
essence of faith. Every one of God's dis- 
tinct commands, and every one of God's 
distinct promises, is presented to the human 
mind on grounds that are reasonable to 
that mind. 

The very mystery of Scripture is a part 
of God's appeal through Scripture to our 
reason. He purposely leaves some por- 
tions of His Word obscure to one genera- 
tion that another generation may have the 
pleasure and profit of clearing them up. 
The human mind cannot be strong apart 
from exercise and discipline. Had one set 
of men conquered all the meaning in Scrip- 
ture, there would be no intellectual arena 
left in it for any other set. Accordingly it 
is from time to time that God uncovers the 
meaning of Scripture, calling attention by 
excavations in each new generation to the 
fulfillment of predictions, lighting up enig- 
matical passages by modern exploration 
and study, always stimulating the best 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

intellectual thought of the day by the prob- 
lems of Scripture, and always giving dili- 
gent minds the delight of making discover- 
ies of truth; and still always keeping back 
in the shadow so much yet unknown as 
furnishes opportunity for investigation to 
the minds of another generation. Honest, 
intelligent distrust of the God of Scripture 
necessarily changes its questionings every 
few years. Much criticism that was enter- 
tained half a century ago has now been 
answered. The light of new thought and 
new information constantly makes some of 
God's scripturally recorded dealings that 
once were characterized as unfair, seem so 
worthy and so necessary, that God stands 
forth from Scripture increasingly beautiful 
as time goes on. Time is always on the 
side of God. 

Even if it be impossible to fully com- 
prehend the God of Scripture, is not the 
fact of our inability to fully comprehend 
Him a forceful appeal to our reason for 
accepting and obeying Him? The human 
mind is of such a nature that it would not 
be willing to own allegiance to a God so 
small that He could be absolutely compre- 
hended by it. The human mind cannot be 
checked in its range by walls of years ; it 

21 



The Great Appeal 

leaps them. Time itself, one billion of 
years if you please, is not enough for the 
mind of man. It sweeps on, and on, and 
on. It wishes limitless space, limitless 
time. It wishes a limitless God, a God so 
great that to think of Him must stretch 
the mind and broaden the intellect. No 
thought has ever done so much to widen 
and develop the human intellect as the 
thought of the boundless God of Scripture, 
the all-powerful, the all-knowing, the all- 
holy, the ever-living, ever-loving God. 
The thought of such a God expands every 
mind in which it dwells. The greatest 
minds become even greater by thinking 
about God. *'I, even I alone," the God 
of Scripture says, *' answer to the capacity 
and nature of the human mind, and there- 
fore I make my appeal to be the mind's 
King and Friend." 

And now God makes His third appeal 
to the intellect, and this time through the 
person of Jesus Christ. Christ was His 
chosen messenger, who was to speak, labor, 
and live as His very voice. The declara- 
tion, ''This is my beloved Son; hear Him," 
indicated Christ to be the mouthpiece, the 
exponent, the manifestation of God. 

Christ appealed to the minds of men by 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

His words. Every one of them was rational, 
every one of them was wise. Though He 
taught for three years, sometimes in pri- 
vate and sometimes in public, sometimes 
before His friends and sometimes before 
His foes, He never gave expression to one 
unwise thought; He said nothing that past 
experience then could gainsay, nothing that 
past experience now can gainsay. *' Never 
man spake as this man'* was the judgment 
of His own generation, and it is the judg- 
ment of every succeeding generation. He 
claimed that every word was absolute truth 
concerning the subject treated ; and all his- 
tory since His day corroborates His claim. 
More and more it is evident that what 
Christ said is the solution of all domestic, 
social, and governmental problems. The 
individual, the home, the community that 
lives His words finds them to be fully and 
always the truth. 

Christ also appealed to the minds of men 
by His miracles. Those miracles were done 
openly, in the presence of the intellect, and 
it was always the intellect that was asked 
to ponder them and their mission. Many 
of Christ's words so commended them- 
selves to man's intellect at the time they 
were spoken, that they needed no corrobo- 
23 



The Great Appeal 

rative testimony, no help to make them 
impressive. But there were words spoken 
by Christ that dealt with matters lying be- 
yond all human knowledge, matters of 
immortality and of the nature of God's 
love. To speak of such matters was to 
make a revelation, to declare the unknown. 
It was necessary that attention be called 
to the words themselves and to the teacher 
of them, in some way that would arouse 
and hold thought. Miracles were means 
to an end: the telescope for the seeing of 
the stars. But as means they made a direct 
appeal to men's minds; an appeal to con- 
sider that what Christ said of God's love 
was true, as miracle after miracle set forth 
the tender, forgiving, welcoming nature of 
God; an appeal to consider that what 
Christ said of immortality was true, as the 
raising from the dead of the child, of the 
youth, of the man, of Himself through His 
own inherent power, made life beyond death 
so credible. Corroborative testimony, in 
addition to words of revelation and of 
promise, was needed, and through miracles 
that testimony was given to man's intellect. 
Christ's supreme appeal to the minds of 
men was through His character. Words 
and miracles alike called attention to Him. 
24 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

The great question He presented to the in- 
tellect was Himself: in birth a narrow Jew, 
but in nature a brother to all humanity; a 
provincial in education, but a sage knowing 
the life of the whole world; a peasant, but 
a king; meek, but authoritative over life 
and over death; gentle, but majestic; dying 
to live; yielding to conquer; a man, but a 
God. No such as He has ever been seen; 
He fulfilled in Himself all righteousness, 
He was perfect in purity, charity, kind- 
ness, justice, happiness. All mankind find 
in Him their ideal; all mankind find in 
Him their helper. As the years of His life 
go on, and we study them, so wondrous, so 
superior to mere flesh and blood does He 
Himself appear, that for such an one to 
enter the grave and conquer it becomes so 
natural an event that we may even antici- 
pate it. Certainly such an one had life in 
Himself so abundantly that "He could not 
be holden by death.'* "Come unto the 
Father, unto my Father, and your Father; 
come to His safety, His peace, His immor- 
tality, '' is the appeal that He quietly but 
unceasingly makes to every thoughtful 
man. 

The God of Scripture satisfies the intel- 
lect. He answers its questions. He tells 
25 



The Great Appeal 

who it was that brought about creation, 
and why; He tells what man's relation to 
God is, made in His very image; He tells 
what man's place is to be in the future, 
when man, restored to the very likeness of 
God, is to dwell with Him in peace forever. 
He even assures the intellect that '*what it 
knows not now, it shall know hereafter,'' 
that clouds are to give way to light, and 
man ''shall know even as he is known." 
He opens before the intellect the opportun- 
ity of an ever-broadening vision and an 
ever-increasing comprehension as the years 
of a blessed eternity move on. 

So sure is God that His appeal to the 
intellect is convincing, is mastering, that 
He even asks that intellect to love Him. 
Cold, judicial, as the intellect is, such is 
God's belief in His power to impress it 
favorably and rouse it into warmth of 
enthusiasm that He bids men ''love" Him 
"with all the mind." He wishes the keen- 
est scrutiny, the sharpest penetration, the 
deepest insight to center upon Him; He 
does not fear them. He welcomes them all. 
That love is safest, He knows, that is wisest. 
That love will have least disappointment. 
He realizes, that is based on surest and 
completest knowledge. "Know Me," he 
26 



The Appeal to the Intellect 

says, *'know Me thoroughly and closely, 
keep knowing Me, until intellectual admira- 
tion shall become intellectual passion, until 
the cold mind shall glow, and the sober 
reason flame forth, and the calm judgment 
burn at white heat — the white heat of 
lover 

The appeal of God needs intellectual 
honesty on man's part if it is to be seen as 
it actually is. Truth never enters a barred 
mind. Do you know aught of duty? Live 
that duty. Present knowledge is a gift to 
be used in action; future knowledge waits 
on that action, and comes only when known 
duty is done. To the degree that the mind 
knows God, let it obey God; and if it so 
obey, it shall grow in knowledge as surely 
as God is truth. 



27 



The Appeal to the Heart 

A blind orphan child was once asked the 
question, '*What is the heart?" Placing 
his hand over his chest, he replied, '*That 
which aches so!" To him, the blind orphan 
boy whose life had lacked so many joys, 
the human heart was the element within 
him that could be lonely, could grieve, 
could know the pain of being neglected, 
as well as the gladness of being loved. 

This attempt at a definition of the heart 
is suggestive. Within every human being 
there is something that desires the interest 
of others; it wishes their thought, their 
solicitous attention. It wishes their sym- 
pathy^ too, their sorrow in its sorrow, and 
their gladness in its gladness. It wishes 
comfort also, so that it may be helped in 
times of difficulty and discouragement. 
And it wishes friendships that comradeship 
that makes it feel the strengthening influ- 
ence of an unselfish presence at its side. 
And then it wishes love^ genuine, abiding, 
28 



The Appeal to the Heart 

forgiving love, that bears toward it only 
true and sweet solicitude. The human 
heart desires many other things; but it 
desires these preeminently. When these 
desires are unmet, the heart is very vacant; 
when they are met, the heart is very full. 

Besides its capacity to receive interest, 
sympathy, comfort, friendship, and love, 
it has capacity to bestow them. When 
we know what the interest, sympathy, 
comfort, friendship, and love are that go 
forth from us toward others, we know what 
our heart is; their extent, their intensity, 
their constancy all indicate whether our 
heart is a great heart or a small heart. 
It is to this tender, affectionate, susceptible 
portion of our being that God makes 
appeal as He seeks our devotion. 

There are two methods used by Him in 
His appeal: one is the negative method, 
the method of making the heart realize 
that no other object than Himself can meet 
its needs, the other the affirmative method, 
the method of presenting Himself as the 
satisfaction of all the desires of the heart. 

In the use of the negative method He 

shows the heart that things cannot give it 

what it desires. He never allows outward, 

touchable, weighable things to make a 

29 



The Great Appeal 

heart continuously happy. There is not a 
child who has not sat down in the midst of 
abundance with a weary, lonely feeling of 
heart. This feeling comes like the wind; 
we do not know whence it cometh. There 
seems no especial reason for it; it is not 
because of any pain of body, any rebuff 
from an associate, any word of instruction 
upon the vanity of life. This feeling exists 
entirely independent of any exterior cause. 
At first it is a matter of surprise to the 
child that he is lonely in the midst of his 
abundance; he cannot understand his own 
feeling. He knows that he has the very 
objects that he desired, and that they are 
his to do with as he pleases. And still he 
is not happy! He may not always voice 
the questioning of his heart in the words, 
*'What does this mean?'* but he wonders 
at his disappointment, and he never for- 
gets those hours in early life when the dis- 
appointment came. 

In later years, when the child has be- 
come a man, he thinks about the experi- 
ence more intelligently. He finds that 
come what may of exterior good into his 
life, that good does not rest and satisfy his 
heart. He is much like the infant child 
that may have softest blankets, and warm- 

30 



The Appeal to the Heart 

est food, and many nurses at hand, but 
still is unhappy, and will be unhappy so 
long as the mother-heart for which he 
seems made, is absent. Every grown 
man realizes sooner or later that all the 
gold, and lands, and houses, and feasts he 
may have do not meet the desires of his 
heart. So soon as he looks away from his 
own experience to the experience of others 
he finds that every other human heart has 
felt or does feel exactly as he feels. A 
man like Croesus has his money, but he 
declares himself unhappy. A man like 
Solomon has his splendor, but he keeps 
talking about the emptiness of life. A man 
like Beckwith has his palace, but he thinks 
by day and by night how lonely his heart 
is. Whenever, in any generation, in any 
land, under any circumstance, there has 
been an abundance of things^ the man who 
had them did not have what his heart 
craved. 

When we reason about this fact it be- 
comes easy for us to understand it; how 
can it be possible for things to meet the 
need of that which wishes interest, sym- 
pathy, comfort, friendship, and love? 
The wanderer in the desert who, almost 
dead from thirst, came upon a pitcher from 

31 



The Great Appeal 

which he expected to drink refreshing 
water, and found that it was filled with 
diamonds and rubies, could not satisfy 
bodily thirst with jewels; all the jewels in 
the world would not, because they could 
not, relieve that thirst. No more can things^ 
however precious, satisfy heart thirst; 
they never have, and they never will. Of 
this fact every one that thinks wisely be- 
comes convinced, namely, that there must 
be water for bodily thirst, and there must be 
love and comfort for heart thirst. 

Then there is a second use to which God 
puts His negative method: He shows the 
heart that no person other than Himself can 
give the heart what it desires, whether the 
person be a supposed divinity or an actual 
being. This failure to satisfy the heart is 
the failure of every god and goddess the 
world over. No divinity has ever been 
imagined whose character corresponded 
with the needs of the human heart. Jupiter 
had unbridled anger, Hermes was a cheat, 
Venus was impure ; they were not deeply 
solicitous of mankind's true happiness, they 
could not be taken to the heart as friends. 
In spite of what a few leaders in Greece 
and Rome said in order to make the best 
of their sorry religious situation, the people 
32 



The Appeal to the Heart 

of Greece and Rome believed that their 
gods were drunken, passionate, profligate, 
given to jealousy, lust, and war. Unre- 
fined paganism makes its gods the enemies 
of human happiness, who must be bought 
off by sacrifices, else they will do harm; it 
makes the images of its gods hideous, and 
many of its temple rites revolting. Even 
the divinities of the Anglo-Saxons, Woden 
and Thor, were rough, harsh, reveling in 
battles and killing with hammers; they 
could never say ''peace" to the heart when 
it was disquieted because of sin and weari- 
ness. Refined paganism endeavored to 
make some of its gods the friends of man, 
like Ceres, the god of the harvest, and en- 
deavored, too, to make the images of its 
gods attractive, and the temples of its gods 
beautiful ; the statue of Apollo was grace 
itself, and the flowers on his altar were as 
sweet as could be found. But no amount 
of art could cover up the lewdness of Ceres 
and the selfishness of Apollo, and when 
the human heart craved disinterested 
affection, and longed to give affection, it 
could not be satisfied, even with the best 
products of refinement. Murderers, thieves, 
adulterers, courtesans, went as freely to 
temples and altars as did the noblest men 
33 



The Great Appeal 

and the purest maidens. It is a fact of 
history that in those days when Tiberius 
was Csesar at Rome, and every accessible 
race of men had been sought, and every 
divinity that could be found had its wor- 
ship in Rome, there was a feeling of disap- 
pointment in the heart of the people; their 
gods wearied them, distressed them, or 
repelled them. And to-day, when Bud- 
dhism exists as a corrective of Brahminism, 
and the Abbe Du Bois says, *' Every Hindu 
procession presents me the image of hell," 
and *' Hindu human sacrifices are frightful 
and appalling,'* there is still a failure in 
heathenism to give the heart what its sweet, 
pure affections desire. Now, as nineteen 
hundred years ago, the human heart 
searches the known world for some divinity 
other than God in whom it can have lov- 
ing, restful, joyous confidence, and it 
searches in vain. The dove found no rest 
for the sole of her foot; the waters were 
on the face of the whole earth; her only 
rest was in God's ark. 

Similarly, it is true that no human person 
can answer to all the needs of the heart. 
Friends do not always remain true; nor if 
they remain true, is it possible for them to 
be with us unceasingly, to understand us 

34 



The Appeal to the Heart 

perfectly, to give the aid that we need, 
and to give it so that it comforts and quiets 
us. The human heart has secrets that 
only an omniscient eye can see; they are 
not always clearly defined to the heart 
itself, so that it can say what it feels and 
needs. There is a limitlessness to its crav- 
ings that makes it restless, even when 
earthly friends are many and are studious 
of its welfare ; there are spaces in it which 
remain unoccupied and cannot be filled, 
even though multitudes do everything in 
their power to make us perfectly happy. 
In Dr. van Dyke's ''Last Word," the noble 
Hermas and the devoted Athenais, his 
wife, have every earthly possession that 
they can crave, wealth of love from and to 
one another, as well as to their beautiful 
boy, a palace rich in treasures material, and 
a home life rich in treasures spiritual, in 
devotion, in truth, in sweet fellowship. 
But in the midst of all their joy they come 
to an hour when both are conscious that 
their hearts are not satisfied, that there is 
nothing more to be secured from one another 
or others that could satisfy their hearts; 
that they must let their hearts feel gratitude 
to some one greater than themselves who 
has given their hearts so much; that they 
35 



The Great Appeal 

must worship Him, must love Him, and 
must feel His love for them. But they do 
not know who He is! They place them- 
selves before an altar. The altar has no 
image on it. They realize that infinitely 
great longings and infinitely great affec- 
tions cannot be satisfied with less than an 
infinite object who is loving and lovable; 
but who is that Object? They cannot tell. 
They have lost the word ^^Christ" out of 
their knowledge and cannot speak it or feel 
its power. They are conscious of larger 
needs than can be met by any one less than 
God; but they are ignorant of Him! Like 
them, every human heart comes to know 
that there are cravings within it that no 
mother*s unselfishness can answer, no 
wife's devotion can content, no friend's 
loyalty can quiet. 

It is when God has thus made His appeal 
to us negatively, and has shown us that our 
hearts cannot be satisfied apart from Him, 
that He makes His appeal affirmatively, 
and assures us that He as friend and helper 
can give our hearts all that they wish. He 
does this through general declarations of 
his affection toward us, and through a 
special manifestation of that affection. 

In a multitude of ways he declares that 
36 



The Appeal to the Heart 

He cares for us tenderly, solicitously, 
patiently. So that we may feel the force 
of this care as thus cherished for us, God 
does two things: one, He teaches His 
own perfection, which is complete; the 
other. He teaches our imperfection, which 
is very sinful. He Himself is without spot ; 
his every attribute is holy. Such is His 
nature that He cannot be tempted of evil; 
nor can he look upon evil with the least 
degree of allowance. His garments are 
clean, His throne is white. His dwelling- 
place is light. Sin is the disturber of His 
earth; He hates it; it is the leprosy that 
destroys His people, and interferes with 
His plans. On the other hand, we are 
spotted with evil; we even cherish sin; 
our thoughts, words, and deeds are run 
through and through with selfishness and 
wrong. There is none that doeth absolute 
good — no, not one. We turn away from 
the right, we choose the lower in prefer- 
ence to the higher, we refuse to yield to 
the best influences. All this is true in 
many respects of every one; of some per- 
sons even stronger descriptions could be 
used, as the drunkard, the thief; the per- 
secutor, the murmurer are mentioned. In 
every instance, even though the best 
37 



The Great Appeal 

among us be thought of, the contrast 
between God's character and our own 
character is very marked. He and we are 
opposites; He is lovable, and we are un- 
lovely. In us are the very elements God 
revolts from; and they are retained within 
us because we wish them there. 

Here, then, is the wonder of God's 
character, that being spotless and com- 
plete. He feels even an agonizing interest 
in us, and wishes us, soiled as we are, to 
give Him our love ! He desires every heart 
that hears of Him, wherever it may be, to 
know that He cares for it unceasingly; it 
may be in affliction, in distress, in loneli- 
ness, in disgrace; but He thinks of it, sym- 
pathizes with it, would comfort it, would 
hold fellowship with it, and would shower 
love upon it. He makes no exceptions in 
this assurance of His care; the heart of 
the lowest and the heart of the highest is 
dear to Him; the heart of the prisoner, the 
heart of the jailer, of the foulest, and of 
the purest. Nor does He make any qual- 
ification in this assurance ; men may disobey 
Him, resist Him, defame Him, and still He 
is their friend, and is ready to do for them 
everything that their hearts need. 

In all the world there is nothing that so 
38 



The Appeal to the Heart 

appeals to the human heart as the assur- 
ance that it is loved by one who is worthy 
and is lovable. Love is the one thing that 
the human heart everywhere is waiting for. 
He who goes most among mankind finds 
that what their hearts crave is not counsel, 
not applause, not power, but disinterested 
love. The knowledge that it is loved is 
the most powerful leverage that can be ap- 
plied to the human heart to cheer it, 
sweeten it, strengthen it. The man who 
knows he has a mother, pure and true, that 
gently but unswervingly and self-sacrific- 
ingly thinks of him by day and by night, and 
prizes his good above her highest joy, is 
helped as he could not be helped by any 
other earthly knowledge, to keep pure and 
true himself. And when the human heart 
is told by God repeatedly that He watches 
over every step of its pathway with affec- 
tion, that He is touched by its hard 
battling, its pain, its failure, that the 
moan of its sorrow reaches Him and the 
weight of its cares and responsibilities is 
felt by Him, the heart has a magnet applied 
to it that draws it as nothing else even 
in heaven could draw it, toward the 
very heart of God. Surely that God is 
indeed a blessed God who comes to Elijah 
39 



The Great Appeal 

under the juniper tree when he is weary 
of body and of mind, and feeds him, and 
rests him, and does everything within 
His power, as carefully as a nurse with an 
infant child, to buoy up his heart; He is a 
blessed God who sees men toiling in dark- 
ness arid in storm, out upon a wind-swept, 
wave-tossed sea, and feels for them, and 
goes through the tempest to them and 
speaks soothingly to them; He is a blessed 
God who, hearing that a healed blind man, 
because he has confessed the truth, has 
lost the sympathy even of his parents, and 
is now an outcast in the streets, goes 
searching for him, and then talks to him 
gently and assuringly. 

One element of that love of God is par- 
ticularly appealing. The heart of mankind 
is sore and bruised; it has gone into a far 
country, despite a father's desire, and has 
been knocked about by many wrongs, and 
is poor and soiled. Is God's love for it 
such that He will forgive it? Yes, God 
will forgive it! God will even rejoice to 
forgive it, if it turn in penitence to Him, 
and He will do for its comfort and joy all 
that the heart needs. *' Perhaps God can 
forgive sin," said Socrates, *'but I do not 
see how." What no one else in all the 
40 



The Appeal to the Heart 

universe promises to the heart, what no 
heathen divinity did promise and no human 
friend can promise, God promises, that 
He will forgive sin, and the wrong-doer 
shall now and always be His dear, honored 
child. '*Yes,'' God says, **heart of man! 
I will do for you all that comfort, and sym- 
pathy, and care, and love can do for you, 
and I will rejoice and be happy, merrily 
happy if you will only let Me be your refuge 
and father.'* 

But even beyond God's general declara- 
tion of His affection to us, there is one 
special manifestation of that affection 
through which God makes His last. His 
supreme appeal to the heart. That special 
manifestation is through the cross of Cal- 
vary. He points to Him who was upon it, 
the only begotten of the Father, full of 
grace and glory. He asks the heart to 
remember that this is His Son, His beloved 
Son, His Son who came from heaven, where 
His glory equaled His own. He asks the 
heart to remember what a father's love for 
his only and precious child is, and then 
to look at the manger wherein that child 
lies in poverty; to look at the child, grown 
to be a man, moving along the valleys and 
over the mountains, at the seaside and in 

41 



The Great Appeal 

Jerusalem, always loving, always helpful, 
but always misunderstood, always ma- 
ligned ; to look still further and see whither 
idle questionings, and evil eyes, and bitter 
lies drove that Son as He is scourged, 
crowned with thorns, crucified between 
thieves, and derided; to look even further, 
and see the lips of the Christ open in loving 
provision for John and Mary, in earnest 
prayer for forgiveness for His persecutors, 
in tender assurance of welcome to the pen- 
itent thief, and then in sublime self-sur- 
render to the temporary power of death! 

Yes, the tragedy of the ages was wrought 
out when Christ came, lived, and went up 
to Calvary. There is a pathos in the scene 
of his death, unsurpassed anywhere; never 
was there a sorrow like this sorrow. But 
the pathos is not its main feature ; its main 
feature is its evidence of the nature and 
degree of God's interest in our hearts. It 
was that interest, that deep, pure, self- 
sacrificing interest of God in us that 
brought Christ into our world ; it was that 
interest in us that gave His Son even to the 
cross, and gave Himself to suffering and 
agony through that cross. The appeal to 
us from Calvary is the appeal of a love 
that shares our sharpest pang, our bitterest 
42 



The Appeal to the Heart 

tear, asking us to let God enter our hearts 
and abide within them. Ever since that hour 
wherein God in His omnipotence exhausted 
all possible means through the cross to tell 
our hearts of the height and depth, the 
length and breadth of His sympathetic, 
self-impoverishing love. He has placed the 
cross of Jesus Christ before us, and said: 
'*By this and all it signifies let me be your 
friend and helper. I can satisfy your 
every need ; I can comfort you and cheer 
you; I can forgive you and enrich you. I 
can meet every longing and answer every 
craving of your heart.'* 



^3 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

It is well known that it was a Roman 
poet, Ovid, who once wrote of himself, *'I 
see and approve of the better course: I fol- 
low the worse." It is not so well known 
what the character of this Roman poet was. 
He was an intelligent man, who understood 
what was safe for himself and for others, 
but who did what was injurious to himself 
and to others: he violated the principles of 
purity, defiling his own life and defiling the 
lives of those who trusted him. He was 
a distinctively wicked man. 

In this little statement concerning him- 
self he indicates what conscience is: it is 
that secret testimony of the inner self that 
approves what it considers right and con- 
demns what it considers wrong. Ovid had 
within him a power that recognizing some 
things as better than others, approved 
those better things, and when he chose 
the other and worse things, disapproved 
of his choice. Ovid's statement concern- 
ing himself is a statement every human 
44 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

being finds true in his own experience; 
something within him passes favorable 
judgment upon the doing of what seems to 
it right, and passes unfavorable judgment 
upon the doing of what seems to it wrong. 
There is what m.en call an arbiter, an 
umpire, within them that, according to the 
rules of thought and action it acknowl- 
edges, declares whether thought and action 
are praiseworthy or blameworthy. 

The idea of a right and of a wrong, and 
of the claim of the right upon his alleg- 
iance, exists in every one. The son of 
an Indian chief had been murdered. The 
murderer, unable to provide a ransom 
or to escape, surrendered himself. Accord- 
ing to the law of the tribe, a remaining son 
of the chief, in the presence of the assem- 
bled tribe, takes a knife and plunges it into 
the murderer's heart. As the murderer 
dies his wife rends the air with cries of 
anguish for herself and her fatherless little 
children. Immediately the chief, moved 
by something within him that tells him that 
while blood ransom is right according to 
the law of the tribe, compassion for help- 
less ones is also right according to the law 
of humanity, speaks out and bids the wife 
come with her little ones to his lodge where 
45 



The Great Appeal 

he will give them a home and protection. 
As his words are heard by the tribe, all 
their voices break forth with the exclama- 
tions: **Right! Right! It is right!" Some- 
thing within them, cruel as they might seem 
while they were feasting upon the sight of 
blood, determined for them a standard of 
right and applauded conformity to that 
standard. The man is yet to be found who 
does not feel that there are some deeds 
which he ought to do and some which he 
ought not to do. Conscience is the inborn 
and inalienable possession of every human 
being. 

Even though the sphere of conscience 
is simply the pronouncing favorably or un- 
favorably upon the moral nature of our 
choices and intentions, and conscience is 
not responsible for the ideas of what is 
right and what is wrong that are furnished 
it by the intellect, its sphere is important. 
Every one is happier and rests more quietly 
when conscience tells him he has acted a 
right rather than a wrong. Approbation is 
always pleasant, especially the approbation 
of that voice within us that speaks oftenest 
and speaks longest. *'I would rather be 
right than be President of the United 
States,*' is a saying attributed to Henry 
46 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

Clay, which has a wealth of wisdom in it; 
the sense of one's own rectitude of purpose 
is worth more for peace and comfort than 
the applause of the whole world. The 
royal murderer, King Richard, is made by 
Shakespeare to say in great distress of 
spirit: 

" My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, 
And every tongue brings in a several tale, 
And every tale condemns me for a villain. 

" Methought the souls of all that I had murdered 
Came to my tent, and every one did threat 
To-morrow*s vengeance on the head of Richard." 

Conscience thus becomes an impelling 
force to do the right and leave the wrong 
undone. It makes ''duty" desirable, for 
when duty is done there will come a judge's 
commendation of the man who has done 
it, and hardship and even torture are worth 
enduring for the sake of that commenda- 
tion. And it makes neglect of duty un- 
desirable, for sooner or later the judge 
that is within the man who has been neg- 
lectful, will speak out and will condemn 
the man for his misdeed. No sensible 
person wishes to go through an experi- 
ence like that of the Earl of Breadal- 
bane, whose conscience kept ever before 
him the massacre he foully planned at 
47 



The Great Appeal 

Glencoe, and took from him his bravery, his 
composure and his sleep; nor does any one 
wish to have Cardinal Woolsey's pitiful 
lament ring in his soul, because like him he 
has violated his sense of rectitude and has 
sacrificed principle to expediency. 

So helpful an aid is conscience to the 
welfare of mankind that he who shapes his 
life according to its dictates shapes that 
life as wisely as he can. Conscience is not 
always an infallible guide, but it is always 
a guide to be followed. Under no circum- 
stances may a person go contrary to what 
he believes to be right ; if he does, he injures 
his whole moral nature. Even though the 
information concerning right and wrong 
that is at hand for conscience to act upon 
be deficient, even though conscience itself 
for some reason be unhealthy, capricious, 
accommodating, conscience is still the 
judge, the arbiter, whose decisions for us 
must be law. Great harm to others has 
been done under the leadership of con- 
science, as Saul for conscience' sake has per- 
secuted, and Torquemada for conscience' 
sake has forced the Inquisition ; but a great 
harm would also have been done the indi- 
viduals themselves, persecutors or inquis- 
itors, had they not responded to conscience 
48 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

and been absolutely loyal to it. What con- 
science needs is knowledge and health; 
knowledge, that it may know matters as 
they actually and fully are; health that it 
may be vigorous, alert, quick in its deci- 
sions. Such knowledge and such health 
must be sought by every one who would 
have his conscience a perfect guide. 

But faulty though man's conscience may 
be through ignorance or through abuse, it 
never ceases to make a distinction between 
right and wrong. It continues to exist and 
to exert a helpful influence, even in the 
most inauspicious circumstances. When 
the gods of the ancient world bade their 
worshipers commit crimes, conscience 
cried out that crime, even though sanc- 
tioned and demanded by divinities, was 
wrong. If Bacchus asked for debauchery, 
conscience said that Zenocrates, who would 
not be a debauchee, was to be commended. 

Lucretia was known to be immaculately 
pure in a time when temples were honored 
by impurity, and the conscience of Rome 
praised her devotion to purity. The great- 
est men of the nation might go through the 
form of bowing before images of detestable 
gods, but conscience told those men that 
they must not be like those gods, detest- 
49 



The Great Appeal 

able. As Rousseau says, *'The voice of 
conscience, stronger than that of the gods 
themselves, made itself heard and respected 
and obeyed on the earth, and seemed to 
banish guilt and the guilty to the very lim- 
its of heaven. " 

All history shows, too, that conscience 
needs to be reverenced. The conscience of 
any given moment is to be the supreme au- 
thority of that moment. To act contrary 
to it is to injure it, destroying its sensibility 
even as searing the skin destroys the sen- 
sibility of the skin. The man who so lives 
as to dull the assertive power of conscience 
until its voice becomes feeble and rings no 
loud summons to duty in his soul is answer- 
able for the condition of his conscience. 
To drink liquor contrary to the dictate of 
conscience until intoxication ensues, and 
no voice whatever of conscience is heard, 
is to condemn one's self. The conscience 
is the supremely authoritative power in 
man's nature. No impulse rises so high 
and pronounces itself so commandingly 
toward virtue as conscience. To yield to 
a supposed wrong is to oppose the best in- 
fluence of our moral nature. While it is a 
mistake to resist any element of the soul 
that cries out for virtue, it is the most 

50 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

serious mistake that can be made to resist 
the voice of highest authority that is in the 
soul. 

To this element of conscience, God, in 
His desire that man should give Him alle- 
giance, makes His appeal. He does this 
first, through the conviction written in the 
human heart that sin is unnatural. Wher- 
ever deformity is found it is called abnor- 
mal. Men with twisted feet or distorted 
faces or hunched backs, and animals and 
flowers with decided misgrowths, are un- 
natural. Lunatics and maniacs are also 
unnatural. So the human heart declares 
that moral deformity is unnatural ; that to 
love God, the lovely, is natural, to love evil, 
the unlovely, is unnatural. It is contrary 
to our very conviction that when the harm 
of wrong is seen we should choose wrong, 
and contrary to the same conviction that 
when the benefit of right is seen we should 
reject right. To prefer the less to the 
greater, the worse to the better, is an 
obliquity of judgment. Were we stationed 
in some other sphere where we could watch 
what is being done upon this earth, we 
should feel, every time we saw a person 
committing a sin, that he was acting as a 
man without control of his reason — like 
51 



The Great Appeal 

a fool, like a madman. It is natural for a 
man to choose the beautiful rather than 
the hideous, the pure rather than the im- 
pure, the healthy rather than the un- 
healthy. All this is what God calls '*the 
law written upon the human heart." God 
now takes that law, and through it He 
comes to conscience, conscience that is 
ready to approve the right and the doing 
of the right, and He presses home upon 
conscience Himself in all His beauty, and 
asks conscience to choose Him rather than 
evil in its hideousness. He calls to con- 
science to discriminate between the natural 
and the unnatural, to listen to the convic- 
tion of the human heart that makes the 
choice of the good natural and the choice 
of the evil unnatural, and to pronounce in 
favor of that benevolent One who seeks 
the good and only the good of man. Ma- 
levolence, as represented by the Evil One, 
is to be feared, not chosen, God argues. 
**Put yourself," He urges, **into harmony 
with your being, come into conformity with 
what is reasonable, and love Me, the true 
and the blessed, for it is a crime against 
nature to disapprove Me, and it is fidelity 
to nature to approve Me." 

God also appeals to conscience through 
52 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

His revealed will. Conscience needs 
knowledge; God furnishes that knowledge 
in His written laws. Those laws are of 
such a nature that He expects conscience 
to recognize their worth and beauty, and 
act upon them. They are perfect laws; 
every one of them is good. The temporary 
laws given through Moses to the Israelites 
as they emerged from Egyptian bondage, 
are based on principles serviceable to pri- 
vate and public welfare. The separation 
of beasts into clean and unclean, with the 
command to offer only the clean to God, 
taught the people the need of personal 
holiness if they wished to please God and 
possess worthy character; and conscience 
can but approve such a command. The 
permanent laws that teach honesty, broth- 
erly kindness, purity, freedom from covet- 
ousness, whenever presented to conscience 
commend themselves to conscience, and 
commend, too, the God who gave them, 
because they are recognized as essential to 
the safety of society. Here, then, is open- 
eyed conscience looking out for the good, 
and God presents to it statement after 
statement of His desire that each and every 
virtue should be chosen, and each and 
every vice should be shunned. He presses 
53 



The Great Appeal 

home these statements by attaching to them 
every possible incentive for their perform- 
ance. He paints the essence of evil in the 
blackest of colors. He makes the person- 
ification of evil, Satan, a traducer, a temp- 
ter, an enemy. He shows that the choice 
of evil eventuates in loss of character, loss 
of self-respect, loss of reputation, and loss 
of the peace and fellowship of God. He 
sets forth the effects of evil within the soul 
itself, making the soul a bond-slave of evil, 
a den of demons, an abode of despair. 
Then He presses upon conscience the 
opposite effects of good that result from 
obedience to His laws; He shows the 
blessedness of having life in harmony with 
the will of the universe, of having God*s in- 
dwelling joy and doing His blissful service, 
of growing into fitness for Heaven, and 
finally of entering Heaven itself with its 
answer to our every highest intellectual, 
moral, and spiritual wish. What an appeal 
all this is to conscience to pronounce in 
His favor! It is a conclusive argument; it 
bears in upon conscience with command- 
ing force. To make it the more easily 
understood God adds illustrations to it, so 
that concrete cases shall show that diso- 
bedience to His laws always ends in sorrow, 
54 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

and obedience to those laws always ends in 
happiness: Cain cherishes hatred, and be- 
comes a sufferer; Saul disregards wisdom, 
and becomes wretched ; Judas sacrifices the 
good for the evil, and becomes an outcast. 
On the other hand, God shows that the 
men and women who were true to His high 
ideals were heroes; that even if they suf- 
fered like Daniel and Stephen, they had 
the priceless boon of pure souls, they had 
His constant benediction, and they entered 
into His eternal reward. And then God 
brings the statement of His revealed will to 
its close in the book of the Revelation, 
wherein He sets forth the conflict between 
the good and the evil, and declares that 
the outcome of that conflict is the com- 
plete overthrow of the evil, and the unend- 
ing triumph of the good. Thus God 
assures conscience that His will shall 
prosper, and all that is contrary to His will 
shall fail. 

God still further appeals to conscience 
through startling providences. When 
Luther, at Erfurt, heard one morning that 
his intimate friend, Alexis, had been assas- 
sinated, the sudden loss of his companion 
aroused him to serious inquiry concerning 
the rightfulness of his life. Later, when 
55 



The Great Appeal 

he was returning from Mansfield, and was 
overtaken by a violent storm, and a thun- 
derbolt sank into the ground by his very 
side, he saw the necessity of devoting him- 
self to that which in the hour of death 
would be satisfying, and holiness presented 
itself more attractively to his conscience 
than ever before. It was a divine appeal 
to Belshazzar*s conscience that God made, 
when in the midst of a feast, that Belshaz- 
zar knew to be shameless, God caused a 
finger to write upon the wall the words 
that declared judgment to be on Belshaz- 
zar's track. Similarly God spoke to Herod's 
conscience when Herod, contrary to his 
conscience having put John the Baptist to 
death, and now hearing of the miracles of 
Christ, is agitated by a sense of his sin, and 
thinks, ''John the Baptist is risen from the 
dead,'' and wonders whether John has 
come back to vex his murderer! Con- 
science never dies. It may long lie dor- 
mant, but God is sure to awaken it. He 
sends some event to arouse it — a pestilence, 
a sudden danger, a great disappointment, 
a serious illness, a grave responsibility. 
When Ananias and Sapphira fell dead be- 
cause they were wrong-doers the con- 
science of every onlooker was quickened. 
56 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

** Dishonesty and deceit are to be avoided, 
honesty and fairness are to be chosen,'* 
was the message of the event. There is no 
community so quiet, and no life so hidden, 
but that God sends into them events that 
startle conscience and make it realize that 
He is a God of judgment, who will not 
suffer evil to go unpunished. Through 
such events God appeals to conscience to 
pronounce in favor of Him whose law is 
righteousness and whose protection is 
safety and peace. 

God has still another means, the means 
of the Holy Spirit, by which He appeals 
to conscience. It is the Holy Spirit that 
convinces of sin. Every time conscience 
is aware that sin is in the soul, the Holy 
Spirit has brought conviction to conscience. 
It is a large part of the work of the Spirit 
thus to quicken conscience. The Holy 
Spirit leaves no conscience unreached. 
The instrumentalities He uses to that end 
are many and are diversified; but they, 
each and all, are sufficient. Sometimes He 
sends a Nathan to a man like David 
whose conscience has been lulled into in- 
sensibility, and Nathan speaks so penetrat- 
ingly that David awakes to a realization of 
his wrong, and beseeches God to forgive 
57 



The Great Appeal 

him. Sometimes He sends a letter, in 
which are written words that tell how a 
parent, whose good wishes were despised, 
loved the child, and thus summons con- 
science to shame and repentance. Some- 
times He sends an entreaty in book, or in 
sermon, or in the conversation of a friend 
that makes duty so clear that conscience 
sees it and approves it, and feels the very 
will of God urging it toward duty. When- 
ever in any soul there is the conviction **I 
ought to be a better man than I am; I 
ought to be God's man," the Holy Spirit 
is pleading with conscience. 

God's last appeal to conscience is made 
through Jesus Christ. God presents Him 
in His spotlessness before conscience. As 
when perfectly white cloth is brought near 
that which bears stain and soot, the con- 
trast makes the stain and soot the more 
offensive, so the absolute sinlessness of 
Jesus Christ deepens within conscience a 
sense of its wrong. "Depart from me," 
said the still selfish Peter, as he saw how 
stainless the Christ at his side was, *'for I 
am a sinful man." The perfect character 
of Jesus Christ lights up in the soul, with 
microscopic distinctness, the consciousness 
of secret evil more perfectly than any code 

58 



The Appeal to the Conscience 

of precepts ever devised. In the strength 
and completeness of His life there is con- 
demnation for all that is weak and faulty in 
man. Christ brings to conscience the 
greatest revelation of sin it can know; He 
uncloaks the soul and shows the soul its own 
sin; He makes judgment upon sin a real, 
because a present and an ever-present, fact. 
But Christ brings, beside a revelation of 
sin, a cure of sin ; He brings a pardon and 
an antidote. He assures conscience that 
sinful though man is, God stands ready to 
create the clean heart in man and save him 
from the guilt and power of all his sins. 
He avows to conscience that the very blood 
He shed on Calvary is evidence of this 
willingness — yes, of this eager desire on 
the part of God to meet all the needs of 
conscience with a free, full, and eternal 
pardon. "No sin,'* he declares, '*is light; 
it is wretched and ruinous." *'But,'* He 
adds, **no sin is invincible; the grace of 
God can conquer it, render it powerless; 
the grace of God can speak peace to the 
most sin-oppressed conscience. '* And then 
He bids conscience look upon Him, the 
very Lamb of God that taketh away the sin 
of the world, and know that if we confess 
our sins God is faithful and just to forgive 
59 



The Great Appeal 

us our sins, and to cleanse us from all un- 
righteousness. 

It is with earnest, tender, pleading en- 
treaty that God appeals to the conscience 
to heed His persuasions and pronounce in 
favor of Him and His beneficent service. 



60 



The Appeal to the Memory 

A man of eighty years of age was lying 
one summer day beneath a tree. It was a 
Sunday morning. He was thinking of any- 
thing that came into his mind. Just then 
a bee flew among the clover that was 
around him, and began its buzzing. The 
buzzing attracted his attention. Somehow, 
as he listened to it, the memory of a day 
more than sixty years in the past came 
back to him; he remembered how the bees 
buzzed in the churchyard of his youth, 
how they buzzed on that special day when 
a friend sat down beside him among the 
clover and asked him to be true to his 
highest ideals of life, and how he trifled 
with conscience that day and was disloyal 
to it. He was a youth in England then, 
and now he was an old man in America. 
But as memory called up the past, and he 
heard again the earnest words of his friend, 
those words came to him with great force, 
and lying there beneath the tree he yielded 
6i 



The Great Appeal 

to their influence and consecrated himself 
to all that those words sought. 

The power of memory whereby we recall 
objects and ideas that were once before 
the mind is both marvelous and blessed. 
It can go back into the past as into 
some dark continent, and like a Stanley 
searching for a lost Livingstone, it can 
search for a name, for a fact, for an idea, 
until at last it comes upon what it once 
heard, felt, or knew, and then it can tri- 
umphantly bring it out from its conceal- 
ment and show it in clear light. It can 
make days long dead thrill with life again, 
can fill with people houses that have been 
tenantless for generations, can hear the 
voices that no mortal ear has heard for 
scores of years, and can see the faces and 
feel the touch of those whose gravestones 
are moss-covered. 

All this the ordinary memory of any one 
can do. But beyond the ordinary memory 
of all is the extraordinary memory of some. 
Men like the historian, Grotius, and the 
religious writer, Pascal, are said to have 
kept in mind everything that they had ever 
read or thought. Themistocles is men- 
tioned as calling by name each of the 
twenty thousand citizens of Athens. Be- 
62 



The Appeal to the Memory 

fore the days of printing, when traditions 
were preserved only in memory, large de- 
mands were made upon memory, and 
memory responded to those demands, re- 
taining with absolute accuracy dates, 
places, and facts that covered hundreds of 
years and pertained to minutest details. 
For many centuries the whole Talmudic 
literature, that includes all sorts of writing 
about the Hebrew Scriptures and about the 
interpretation of its law^s — a mass of liter- 
ature exceeding many times in bulk Homer 
and the Bible and the Vedas of India, was 
handed down orally from one memory to 
another memory. Even to-day in India, 
where writing has been in use for twenty- 
five hundred years, the Vedic traditions 
are not trusted to it. Those traditions are 
learned from the lips of a living teacher. 
So perfect has been the perpetuation and 
transmission of these traditions that the 
teacher can open his memory and find any 
passage, any word, and any accent that 
may be desired. The memory is some- 
times, by native gift or by acquired power, 
so unusual that in certain cases it can 
repeat five hundred words of an unknown 
language after hearing them twice; can 
listen to poems for days in succession and 

63 



The Great Appeal 

reproduce each as fast as heard, and can 
read histories, and can give every para- 
graph and line with unerring certainty. 

Such extraordinary memories simply em- 
phasize the wonderful nature of memory 
itself. It is memory that enables us to 
profit by past experience. Without it we 
could never advance from failure to suc- 
cess — excepting by the merest accident. 
The mechanic, not recalling his mistakes, 
would commit them over again; the sailor 
would have no home port to which his 
heart and his boat could turn back; the 
human mind would have in it only the 
swiftly fleeting impression of the immediate 
instant, and so would be without reserved 
resources of any kind. Should memory 
cease to have its part in our lives, prog- 
ress would become a word without a mean- 
ing, gratitude would be impossible, family 
circles would have no ties of unity, all the 
sentiments of mind and heart would be 
without a base of support, and life would 
be chaotic, each individual balancing on a 
point which had no suggestion of a past 
and no suggestion of a future. So essen- 
tial is memory to the happiness and well- 
ordering of human life that it is called 
'*the golden thread that links together all 
64 



The Appeal to the Memory 

the mental gifts and excellencies." Their 
practical value depends upon memory. 

The great importance of memory makes 
it desirable that memory should be imper- 
ishable. So long as we live we need the 
profit of experience. Memory never dies. 
The seemingly forgotten is often recalled. 
Deeds that have not been thought of for 
half a century may start up in a moment. 
A whole lifetime may pass before mental 
vision in seconds. Persons falling from 
windows have reviewed their entire lives 
before reaching the ground. Poems unre- 
cited since childhood recite themselves in 
age. In special cases of disease whole 
pages of books read many, many years 
ago are repeated, though it was thought 
not one word of those pages had been re- 
tained in memory. Let the proper circum- 
stances arise for the awakening of memory, 
and memory will assert powers that were 
so long dormant as to be considered dead. 
Memory is, as De Quincey said, like a 
palimpsest, one of those old parchments 
whose original writing has been rubbed 
down and obliterated so that other writing 
might be placed upon the seemingly blank 
page, but which upon the application of the 
proper chemicals reveal their first writing. 
65 



The Great Appeal 

Memory may be written over and over 
again until only the last writing is seen 
when attention first is directed to memory; 
but every writing is written indelibly, and 
can be brought to light. There is not a 
thought, a purpose, a deed, which has failed 
to stamp itself somewhere upon memory, 
and all that is needed is some event that 
shall uncover what is above them, and lo! 
they will stand forth as clear as though 
they were a part of yesterday and not of 
twenty years ago. 

This power, so marvelous in its nature, 
so necessary to human welfare, is one of 
God's chosen instruments to draw us to 
Himself. The Israelites upon the farther 
shore of the Red Sea looked back across 
the water, and that look-back taught them 
God's protection for those who had allowed 
Him to guide them, and God's overthrow 
for those who, like Pharaoh's hosts, had 
resisted His will. And the look-back has 
ever been a means used by God to enforce 
the thought of His promised blessings 
and of His predicted penalties. If memory 
will only recall the past, God is sure that 
men will see that He is the God of history, 
and that they have reason for believing in 
His faithfulness. At every great crisis in 
66 



The Appeal to the Memory 

the experience of Israel He summoned the 
people to ^'remember. " When Moses was 
to die, He bade Moses gather the whole 
nation and then rehearse their past — their 
past, with its difficulties and its deliver- 
ances, with its gracious interpositions for 
their welfare when their heart was true to 
Him, and with its firm punishment of their 
misdeeds when they rebelled against Him, 
and then by means of memory He showed 
them that no strange god had been with 
them, but a wise, good God, whose heart 
was tender and patient, and whose hand 
was mighty and bountiful. Again, when 
Joshua is to die, and another very trying 
hour has come in the life of Israel, He bids 
the tribes gather as of old, and then one 
by one He caused Joshua to make a re- 
statement of all the words God had spoken 
concerning Israel during Joshua's leader- 
ship. When memory had all these words 
before it, He asked, **What one of all these 
words has failed?'* Memory knew that 
not one had failed; and so God, through 
memory, tried to persuade Israel to rely 
upon Him, the unfailing One, and submit to 
His guidance. Later, God made the same 
appeal to David when He brought him face 
to face with Goliath, and then reminded him 
67 



The Great Appeal 

of the lion and the bear out of whose paws 
He had once delivered him, and so gave 
him reason for trusting Him in this new 
emergency. Later still, when Peter was in 
danger of being impatient with weak hu- 
manity and of losing his love for them, 
God reminded him how in the time of 
Peter's own fall God was patient and loving 
with him, and that remembrance cheered 
and sweetened Peter's heart. The mem- 
ory of trials overcome, gives courage for 
new undertakings, and the memory of in- 
juries pardoned, gives sympathy for the 
sinful. 

One of the means God sometimes em- 
ploys to arouse memory is trouble. When 
everything at their hand is just as men de- 
sire it, they are fascinated by the present; 
when the present is somewhat unsatisfac- 
tory, but everything seems to be coming 
toward their hand just as they desire it, 
they are fascinated by the future. Such 
fascination is a peril only when it so ab- 
sorbs the soul that the soul feels no need 
for God Himself. With all our wants met 
and our ambitions gratified, with the star 
of hope rising higher and higher upon our 
pathway, and with no pressing conscious- 
ness of any unfulfilled lack in our lives, it 
68 



The Appeal to the Memory 

is easy to forget God and His ideals. Then 
it is that God steps in and checks the 
career of success. He brings forward cir- 
cumstances that make the present disap- 
pointing and the future uninviting. He 
makes it easy and even necessary for the 
thought to turn back to Him. The prod- 
igal son had no longing for a father's love 
and all the pure joys of a father's home so 
long as money held out, and companions 
praised, and life was merry. But when 
money failed, and friends deserted, and 
food gave out, when no one helped him, 
and it was evident that no one would help 
him, then memory called up a picture of 
the good home, the abundant table, and 
the father's love, and in his distress the son 
heeded the voice of memory and turned 
homeward. Just as a little child wanders 
in the fields, chasing the butterflies and 
pulling the daisies, and never thinks of its 
danger so long as daylight lasts, but when 
the sun declines, and the shadows deepen, 
and night comes on, becomes aware of its 
loneliness, and remembering the place of 
safety and love, wishes to be there, so the 
human heart comes at last to hours of need 
that remind it of God and make it wish 
His protection. Manasseh remembered 
69 



The Great Appeal 

God when he became a captive at Babylon. 
Hezekiah bethought him of God when Sen- 
nacherib threatened his destruction. The 
taking of a beloved child to Heaven often 
directs eyes that have been looking parallel 
with the earth, straight up toward the skies. 
Other helpers fail, and then the unfailing 
Helper is remembered. God never allows 
any life to have an unchecked career of 
prosperity. He gives a disappointment at 
school, a failure in sport, a slight in soci- 
ety; He gives a loss in business, or an ill- 
ness in the home, or a misunderstanding 
among friends. Hours of sorrow are not 
sent because He is glad to send them, but 
because through them He wishes to make 
the thoughtless thoughtful and incline their 
hearts to seek Him. In these hours He 
calls to memory to remember Him and His 
goodness, and then to come to Him and 
have His comfort. 

Another means used by God to arouse our 
memory is His description of His own 
memory. He never forgets. Every one 
of our words, of our thoughts, of our acts 
is recorded in His memory. Nothing that 
men can do can efface one writing in God's 
''book of remembrance." If a cup of cold 
water is given in His name, the letters that 
70 



The Appeal to the Memory 

register it are indelible; millions of foes 
may attempt to ruin the reputation and 
character of the giver, and may drag His 
name in the lowest filth, but they cannot 
blur one smallest iota of those letters. 
This "book of remembrance'* contains a 
record of surpassing importance. Every 
instance of a kindly thought of God, every 
instance of a kindly reference to God is 
noted there; so, too, is every feeling of 
sympathy, every deed of compassion, every 
step of humility. But it has its debit 
column as well as its credit column. Every 
instance of wrong is noted there — the lust- 
ful look, the hateful desire, the idle word, 
the weak vacillation, the petty selfishness, 
the impatient murmur. The sins unknown 
to our fellows, the wrongs committed 
years ago in other communities and never 
mentioned to us, the mischief wrought to 
tender consciences that made them weaker 
ever afterward — all these and many more 
may be forgotten by us for the time, but 
they are never forgotten by God. 

To some men their past is a haunted 
chamber; all sorts of disturbing memories 
are in it; to enter it is to face the specters 
of evil. To all men their past is at least 
condemnatory; it is stained; it needs for- 

71 



The Great Appeal 

giveness. The stoutest heart is dismayed 
as it thinks of an hour when every wrong- 
ful thought and every envious wish shall be 
brought forth from their concealment and 
displayed in the presence of men and 
angels; when God's book shall be opened 
and read, and our own memory, that infal- 
lible autobiographer, shall tally with every 
secret then declared! What shame of 
spirit will be ours then, what sense of fail- 
ure! 

With this great thought of His own un- 
failing memory before us God now comes 
to our memory, our memory that has 
reason to dread God's memory, and He 
tells us that if we will but repent from all 
wrong and let Him be our redeemer and 
advocate, He will Himself assume the shame 
of our sins. He will cover them with His 
hand, and they shall never be mentioned 
against us; He will write our names in 
imperishable letters of light in the ''book 
of life," and, clearing the record, will pre- 
sent us faultless before the throne of the 
majesty on high! 

God also arouses the memory by visible 

objects. There may be a little worn shoe 

put away in a bureau drawer, and one day 

as a mother is looking through that drawer 

72 



The Appeal to the Memory 

the eye falls upon the shoe. In an instant 
the memory of her baby child fills her 
thought. She sees him as he was before 
the fever came and stopped his play. She 
sees his smile and outstretched arms. She 
sees every incident of his sickness, every 
incident of those last hours when she tried 
to keep him in her arms, but was permitted 
to keep him only in her heart. Edmund 
Burke in the evening of public life lost his 
only son, at the age of twenty-one, a youth 
of the rarest genius and varied accomplish- 
ments. One day long afterward, the fav- 
orite horse of the young man came up to 
Mr. Burke as he was standing by the stile, 
and, as if in expression of his mute sym- 
pathy, put his head over the shoulder of 
the bereaved father. Overpowered with 
the memories thus awakened, Mr. Burke 
burst into tears. 

God has always known and used the 
power of visible reminders. He placed a 
memorial altar at Rephidim when He made 
Israel to prevail over Amalek, so that all 
who in after times should see it would be 
reminded of the assistance given His people 
in their dire need, and would trust Him as 
the God of battles. He instituted the 
Passover Feast, and commanded that once 

73 



The Great Appeal 

a year every family should gather all its 
members about a slain lamb, and then as 
they gazed upon the lamb the father should 
describe how God brought Israel out of 
Egypt on the night when the lintels were 
marked with the blood of a lamb. Thus 
through memory of a past deliverance He 
appealed to Israel still to believe in Him 
as their Redeemer. 

And to-day He makes use of visible 
helps that shall stir memory and lead the 
soul to Himself. Baptism is such a help. 
Every time the rite of baptism is wit- 
nessed, memory is reminded that the life 
needs cleansing if it is to be free from the 
stain and power of sin ; and baptism calls 
on every one who sees it to open the heart 
to the purifying and sanctifying work of 
God's spirit. The Lord's Supper is also 
such a help. Over the bread and wine that 
symbolize the broken body and shed blood 
of Jesus Christ is the inscription, '*This 
do in remembrance of Me"; and the 
Lord's Supper calls upon every observer to 
think back to Calvary and to Him who 
went up thereon and poured out His life 
that sin should no longer have dominion. 
Jean Paul Richter came to the Lord's 
Supper for the first time, and he wrote of 
74 



The Appeal to the Memory 

it: ''I left it with the purity and infinity of 
Heaven in my heart, with an unlimited, 
gentle love which I felt for every human 
being, with affection for all who were with 
me there. " God has appointed this feast 
that through it He may reach memory and 
bring to mind the unspeakably great love 
which went through death itself to win us 
to His salvation. 

Nor does God cease His appeal to mem- 
ory with visible helps. He has an invis- 
ible help, in the Holy Spirit Himself, a 
part of whose mission it is to put men in 
remembrance of the past. He inspired the 
memories of the apostles so that they 
recalled the words Christ had said in their 
presence months and years before, and 
through those words He persuaded them to 
believe in the truthfulness of Christ's 
claims, and through those words He 
enabled them to write out an accurate 
statement of Christ's sayings. '*He 
brought all things to their remembrance 
whatsoever Christ had said." When He 
was risen from the dead His disciples 
remembered that He had predicted His 
resurrection ; then they believed His word. 

The Holy Spirit never ceases reminding 
us of those things that we ought to heed. 
75 



The Great Appeal 

He causes words spoken by a friend or 
parent to reappear in our thought, and 
plead with us to be true to God. He 
makes us remember the affectionate coun- 
sel given by a teacher, the earnest entreaty 
spoken by an old companion, the rebuke 
sent by a holy man of God. Every time 
voices come out of the past, calling to us 
to be loyal to God, they are sent to us by 
the Holy Spirit. 

A boy only a few years old was brought 
to his father's death chamber. The godly 
man drew him close to the bed, gave him a 
tender farewell kiss, and then laying a 
trembling hand upon his head, uttered a 
blessing, giving him solemnly to God. 
''Remember,** said he, *'that your dying 
father kissed you, blessed you, and gave 
you to God. " All through life the memory 
of that act and those words lingered with 
the boy. In youth temptations came, but 
he said, "No; I must not do this, for I am 
the boy that was kissed, and blessed, and 
given to God.'* Many times he thus 
resisted temptation. Then later on in life 
great burdens came to him. He thought: 
"I must not succumb to these sore trials. 
The Lord has not forsaken me. There 
must be something good yet to come out 
76 



The Appeal to the Memory 

of all this darkness and bitterness, for I am 
the boy that was kissed, and blessed, and 
given to God.'* At last he went to the 
insane asylum, where he spent several 
years. In his brighter moments he would 
say to his daughter: *'Here I am, shut 
away from those I love, in this far-off 
place; I am very lonely. There is no one 
to sing to me. All seems dark. It is a 
strange Providence!" Then would break 
upon his mind again the dear old sacred 
memory, which the Holy Spirit brought 
him, and he would add, ''Yet it must be 
right, for I am the boy that was kissed, 
and blessed, and given to God." 

Well may we thank God for memory. 
John Newton, with his health almost gone, 
could remember two things: one that he 
was a great sinner, the other that Jesus 
Christ was a great Saviour — two things, 
but they were of greatest importance. 
''When I try to make myself an infidel," 
John Randolph said, "I fancy I feel the 
hand of my mother on my head, and her 
voice sounding in my ear as she taught me 
to say, 'Our Father who art in Heaven.' " 
Yes, memory is a blessed means of good, 
if used aright; but if used awrong it car- 
ries with it a fearful responsibility. It is 

77 



The Great Appeal 

that element which in retribution supplies 
conscience with material for its remorse. 
'*Son, remember!" is said to him who had 
wasted his opportunities, misused God's 
gifts, and disregarded God's love. Mem- 
ory brings despair to those who ruin their 
lives. 

And so God appeals to us to remember 
His care and love, and accept them; to 
remember His wise precepts, and live 
them; to remember His assurance of an 
eternity, and then to see to it that in that 
eternity ours is the memory of a life spent 
in devotion to His blessed will. 



78 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

It was a moment of revelation to George 
John Romanes when the thought flashed 
through his mind that as he believed in the 
love of his mother toward him, so he might 
believe in the love of God toward him. He 
was a hard-working, brilliant student in 
natural science. He had been accustomed 
to things that could be seen and handled. 
He would put them under the microscope 
and look at them, or w^ould put them in the 
scales and weigh them, or would compute 
with mathematical figures what they could 
do. It seemed to him as though human 
life must be considered and explained on 
the basis of visible, tangible, computable 
things; as though faith in an invisible God 
and confidence in His love toward him 
could not be expected from an exact mind. 
But when he bethought him of the love of 
his mother toward him, a love that be- 
longed to a part of his life with which the 
microscope, the scales, and the computa- 
79 



The Great Appeal 

tion tables had nothing whatever to do, and 
then let his imagination suggest to him that 
the love of God was like that mother's love, 
only greater, tenderer, purer, George John 
Romanes gave up his doubt and entered 
into happy confidence in God. This 
change came about simply because he re- 
membered that one element of his nature 
believed in things like love, that are invis- 
ible, and then because he let imagination 
lift that element of his nature from the 
mother whom he had seen, to the God whom 
he had not seen. 

It would be unwise for any one desiring 
to influence himself or another to overlook 
the place of imagination in man's inner 
being. Napoleon asserted when, at the 
outset of his career the government of 
France, called the Directory, devised 
methods of procedure that dealt only with 
visible facts, that "the government could 
not last because it did nothing for the 
imagination." He claimed then and 
always that ^'imagination rules the world**; 
that the thing desired is more powerful 
than the thing possessed, that the changes, 
surprises, glories, pictured to the mind as 
possible have greater influence than what 
is already realized. 

80 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

Every period of human life is equally 
under the sway of imagination. Childhood 
finds its delight in arranging chairs in due 
order, calling them a train of cars, appoint- 
ing a conductor, starting and stopping the 
train, and shouting the names of stations. 
The sports of children are little romances, 
composed and acted out by the inborn 
imagination; the * Splaying horse" with a 
stick, the doll party with its name for 
each one of the company and with its deli- 
cious dishes of dainties. Youth, too, finds 
its delights in imagination. Richard 
Whittington, when a penniless boy, sat 
down beside the road leading into great 
London-town, and seeing the Lord Mayor, 
in rich clothes and with brilliant equipage 
ride by, had a vision pass before him when 
he himself would be Lord Mayor, and that 
vision never faded from his sight. As 
youth begins to understand the value of 
power, and of wealth, and of learning, 
imagination comes forward and creates 
scenes in which youth does some mighty 
deed, or prospers in some great venture, or 
wears some crown of literary reward. Nor 
is maturity uninfluenced by imagination. 
Grant was a cadet, started in his manhood, 
when Winfield Scott, the commanding Gen- 
8i 



The Great Appeal 

eral of the United States army, visited 
West Point, and when Grant saw him, there 
came to him an anticipation of the time 
when he would occupy the very position 
held by General Scott. Mr. Gladstone 
once said, ''I am leading a dog's life." 
Lord Houghton answered, ''Yes, you are 
leading a St. Bernard dog's life"; and im- 
mediately the picture of the St. Bernard 
dog, rescuing and saving the needy in the 
snows of the Alps, put heart and courage 
into Mr. Gladstone. Even age, too, is 
swayed by imagination. Large as is the 
place reminiscence has in age, it is the 
future as well as the past that beckons for 
attention. Promises of rest and assurances 
of comfort make their strongest appeal to 
the weary. Those who have been longest 
on the sea are most drawn by visions of the 
harbor; those who have wandered farthest 
in the desert dream oftenest of the oasis. 
The importance to human welfare of im- 
agination is incalculable. It increases the 
vivacity of childhood, widens out the 
horizon of youth, stimulates the purposeful 
energies of maturity, and sustains the buoy- 
ancy of age. It is a great inventor, lead- 
ing into new combinations of ideas, new 
views of facts, new descriptions of life. It 
82 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

enabled John Bunyan, shut up in Bedford 
jail, to see far beyond the walls that con- 
fined him, and beyond the persons who 
were associated with him, and he beheld 
beautiful meadows and bright streams, 
companies of human, and superhuman 
beings too — and then he pictured for 
others the progress of a Christian pilgrim 
as he makes his way through spiritual diffi- 
culties onward toward the Celestial City 
of light and gladness. It guided Milton 
when, with his physical eyes closed to the 
objects about him, it placed before his 
spiritual eyes the warfare waged by fallen 
angels to overthrow the God of Heaven, 
and enabled him to write out his '* Paradise 
Lost," with its description of things seen 
and unseen that had never before been pre- 
sented to human thought. 

The realm of imagination is as wide as 
the processes of the soul. Poets sing 
effectively only as they look through out- 
ward form, discern the inner spirit of things, 
and then tell the world what that invisible 
spirit is that they have seen. Painters, 
too, startle or quiet us, call forth our 
energy or lull us into repose according as 
they put before us '*a light that never was 
on land or sea," and make trees to speak, 

83 



The Great Appeal 

and brooks to laugh, and stones to preach. 
Raphael sat down before the few sentences 
that describe the Transfiguration and let 
imagination tell him what the light was 
"that was above the brightness of the sun 
at mid-day,'* and tell him, too, how the 
transfigured Redeemer and His heavenly 
companions appeared as they soared above 
the earth, sustained, as it were, on a sea 
of glory; and then he was enabled to give 
the world his latest masterpiece. And 
sculptors also are dependent for success on 
imagination. Virgil described the coming 
of serpents to the shore of ancient Troy, 
which straightway find the priest Laocoon 
who had opposed the entry of the wooden 
horse, and finding him and his sons, wind 
about them and crush them to death. 
When the unknown sculptor who afterward 
wrought out in marble the scene of this 
death struggle of Laocoon with the ser- 
pents, made his marvelous production, he 
put his own imagination into it so largely 
that to-day the admiring world must study 
long to understand all there is in ''The 
Laocoon." 

Imagination is a very useful element in 
human life. Galileo saw a chandelier 
swinging in the cathedral at Pisa, and then 
84 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

he imagined a pendulum that would swing, 
and lo! he has invented the clock. New- 
ton saw an apple fall from a tree, and then 
he imagined that some great law of gravi- 
tation drew that apple to the earth, and lo ! 
he has discovered the force which holds 
the planets in their places. Sir Humphry 
Davy saw that the gaseous damp caused the 
miner's lamp to explode, and then he imag- 
ined what kind of a lamp might be made 
that would be safe in the miner's work, 
and lo! he has devised the *' safety lamp." 
Agassiz saw scratches in rocks, and won- 
dering how they came there, he imagined 
that once a great mass of ice with stones 
and bowlders in it came grinding down over 
the rocks and left these marks of their 
path, and lo! he has given the world its 
glacial theory. Columbus imagined, and 
he found an America; Whitney imagined, 
and he perfected his cotton-gin; Jefferson 
imagined, and he wrote a declaration of 
independence. It is imagination that 
causes advance in philosophy, enlargement 
in business, strife after ideals as yet un- 
reached. Beauty, statesmanship, moral- 
ity, all would cease were there no imagina- 
tion to inspire them. Peter the Hermit, 
Ignatius Loyola, Wendell Phillips, Pasteur, 
85 



The Great Appeal 

every man who has shaken the world did it 
with the lever of imagination. 

*'If you plan to control men," said 
Maurice Thompson, * 'you first captivate 
the imagination." Imagination seems to 
be prepared by nature itself for an appeal. 
''She softens distance by her interposed 
atmosphere, or gives unreal or picturesque 
effects by her wizard mists; she gilds 
the horizon with the unnatural lights of 
the breaking morning, or envelops in the 
glorious pomp of a splendid sunset; she in- 
stitutes contrasts which cannot but be 
noticed, between a scene in its common 
aspects and everyday garments, and the 
same when it puts on ideal appearances and 
wears its holiday attire." 

To this imagination, thus open to appeal, 
evil makes its approaches. Much of the 
persuasive power of evil lies in the use it 
makes of the imagination. Evil presents 
sin through pictures that suggest only the 
pleasurable. It makes itself alluring be- 
cause it promises so many and so great 
delights. It causes wealth, and kingdoms, 
and applause to pass before the eyes, and 
then says, "All these will I give you if you 
will worship me." It paints in brilliant 
coloring the gratification that will come 
86 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

from indulged passion, and thus tempts us 
to be unchaste, or revengeful, or covetous. 
It makes St. Anthony, even when he has 
become a hermit, see bewitching forms 
that call to him to do wrong. It wreathes 
the wine cup, and puts a glamour on many 
an object that seen only as it actually is, 
would be powerless to mislead. 

But God also appeals to imagination. 
He disputes with evil the approach through 
it to the soul. It is the great, the uncom- 
mon, the beautiful, as Addison says, that 
cause the pleasures of imagination; the 
great, because imagination loves to roam 
in vast expanses and behold limitless ob- 
jects; the uncommon, because imagination 
longs for the new or rare, and exults in the 
discovery of the surprising; the beautiful, 
because imagination craves that which 
shall satisfy it, and only beautiful imagery 
can satisfy it. The great, the rare, the 
beautiful are the means by which God ap- 
peals to the imagination. 

The Book which God uses to reach the 
soul is pervaded from opening to closing 
with imagination. It speaks of matters so 
deep that they cannot be sounded, so vast 
that they cannot be comprehended, so full 
that they cannot be reduced to speech, so 
87 



The Great Appeal 

sublime that they cannot be described. 
He makes Himself one whom no eye hath 
seen nor can see, and still we are asked to 
believe in Him and love Him. To believe 
in Him we must imagine Him; imagine, 
through descriptions given in Scripture, 
His character and His care, and thus hav- 
ing through imagination created Him, to 
believe in Him. Any reference that He 
has ever made to Himself is an appeal to 
the imagination. If He calls Himself a 
shepherd, He immediately uses words con- 
cerning His provision for those he protects, 
that make Him unlike any shepherd ever 
known. Imagination is required to under- 
stand how a shepherd sets a table before 
his flock, anoints their head with oil, and 
causes them to dwell in the house of the 
Lord forever. But through imagination 
the human soul can grasp the ideas of God's 
care, and love, and bountiful grace thus 
expressed, and can say intelligently ''The 
Lord is my Shepherd." 

So, too, all God's promises are an appeal 
to the imagination. Two of those prom- 
ises stand out as preeminently strong ap- 
peals to the imagination. One is the 
promise that this earth shall be redeemed 
from every curse. 

88 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

In all its parts this promise has to do 
with imagination. The uncursed earth of 
Eden was such an earth as only imagina- 
tion can conceive. It was fruitful and 
lovely beyond any garden in which we have 
walked. Every sense was gratified, and 
was unceasingly gratified. There was 
nothing to hurt nor make afraid. No thorn 
was there nor harm of any kind. It was 
ideal, a land of sunshine and gladness, of 
flowers and gems, of fragrance and glory, 
far fairer, far richer than our eye has ever 
seen. Imagination, and imagination alone, 
can picture it. But the earth that ap- 
peared after the word was spoken, '* thorns 
and thistles shall it bring forth,'* is the 
earth that we know, an earth of evil men 
and evil deeds, of sorrow and suffering and 
death. No imagination is needed by us to 
see the earth that now is, but it is needed 
to see the earth that is promised. All cre- 
ation to-day groans and travails in pain. 
Nothing is perfect; every beast has its 
aches and pains, every brightest-hued 
flower fades, every human being is touched 
with weakness. We hear of wars and 
rumors of wars; we see the drunkard, the 
libertine, the despot; we meet with false- 
hood, and envy, and hatred. Yes, thorns 
89 



The Great Appeal 

and thistles are everywhere, in the heart of 
man as well as in the field. But there is to 
come a change, and such a change God 
promises, as shall make this a new earth, an 
earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, and 
where every sound, every sight, every 
motive that will be known, shall be perfect. 
Beasts shall no longer be ravenous, flow- 
ers shall no longer fade, man shall no 
longer suffer. ** There shall be no pain 
there; and there shall in no wise enter 
into it anything that defileth, neither what- 
soever worketh abomination or maketh a 
lie; and there shall be no night there." 
What this promise means no power within 
us, excepting imagination, can even suggest. 
Memory may recall experiences of delight 
once enjoyed on earth; the view perhaps, 
from Mt. Rhigi, as at daybreak the summer 
sun lifted itself above the horizon of snow- 
capped mountains and poured its rainbow 
hues upon field and stream, hill and 
meadow, cottage and hamlet, lighting them 
with a glory transcendently lovely; the 
hour perhaps, when friendship was sweet, 
and the confidences of love brought perfect 
peace, and there came into the soul a feel- 
ing that all mankind was pure — and we 
looked out on existence and exclaimed, 
90 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

*'How good it is to be alive!'* But at 
their best these experiences of delight were 
temporary; we came down from the moun- 
tain to the vexations of anxiety, and we 
exchanged the hour of joy for the hour of 
weariness. It is to imagination that God 
therefore addresses Himself when He says, 
that His grace is to abound much more 
than sin abounded, that the music of Eden 
is to be succeeded by a sweeter, fuller 
music, that every object is to be complete 
and every person is to be holy, that kings 
and queens are to be His devoted servants, 
and that pleasure, true, sweet, abounding 
pleasure is to be unceasing! 

What an appeal this is to the imagina- 
tion ! It calls upon imagination to consider 
that, little as our earth is among the vast 
bodies of space, it is the theater where God 
is working out a superbly sublime purpose. 
Here, and here alone, has He shown the 
greatness of His love; here and here alone, 
has His only Son become incarnate and 
died. It is toward this earth that the eyes 
of all angelic beings are directed — princi- 
palities and powers of evil, principalities 
and powers of good. Though our world is 
but a speck in the limitless sky with its mil- 
lions upon millions of stars, and though our 
91 



The Great Appeal 

world might seem too insignificant for the 
God of the universe ever to give it more 
than a passing thought, God tells imagina- 
tion that He has undertaken to redeem it 
from every sin, and that all created intelli- 
gences in heaven, in earth, and under the 
earth are watching the progress of His 
work. He calls upon imagination to look 
out and see the countless eyes that are 
eagerly viewing our struggle, to look up 
and see His own eye as it rests upon us in 
love and desire; He calls upon us to look 
forward and see the assembled hosts as in 
the day of His victory they gather from 
every part of His creation, great multitudes 
of them, and rejoice, men and angels to- 
gether, over a redeemed earth and a re- 
deemed race. And then He pleads with 
imagination by the grandeur and joy of 
that day, by the interest the whole uni- 
verse feels in our salvation, to let His love 
melt our hearts and bring us into the num- 
ber of those who shall be the trophies of 
His grace. 

There is still another promise through 
which God makes special appeal to the im- 
agination; it is His promise of a place in 
His eternal home. What that home is He 
has never described; He has merely told 
92 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

us that there is such a home, and that He 
intends to bring all who are loyal to Him 
into it. He leaves all that lies beyond 
death merely outlined; the filling in is to 
be done by imagination. No man can tell 
in exact language what it is, to be away from 
God in eternity, nor what it is, to be with 
God in eternity. But imagination is not 
left without guidance when God presents to 
it the promise of endless life in His pres- 
ence; it is told assuredly that in life or in 
death what God requires is a right relation 
of the soul to Himself. His every wish 
for us is a wish for our God-likeness. 
Every influence He brings to bear upon 
imagination is to lead us into conformity 
with His will. He told Jacob that his seed 
should be ^^as the sand of the seashore," 
that thus, through imagination's picture of 
a wondrously large following, blessed 
through descent from him, Jacob might be 
inspired to courage, and patience, and 
noble undertaking. He told Isaiah to say 
to Israel that all the trees of the forest 
should come to Zion to beautify it, and 
camels and dromedaries should come with 
treasures, and then He appealed to Israel, 
through imagination, to be hopeful, and 
trusting, and holy. He tells wicked men 

93 



The Great Appeal 

that they must forsake their wickedness, 
else they will dwell in outer darkness, where 
selfishness and sin have their habitation. 
He tells imagination to picture that habita- 
tion and to make it anything and every- 
thing that will render sin fearful and hate- 
ful. 

Thus it is God makes the "outer dark- 
ness'* or '*inner light" of eternity to be 
decided by one's own character. When, 
then, He portrays His eternal home. He 
makes its central figure to be His own Son, 
who once trod this earth, veiling the glories 
of His Godhead within flesh and blood, and 
wearing perfection beneath the form of a 
servant. Imagination always requires the 
finite as the basis of its thought. It is the 
man Christ Jesus, therefore, that He sets 
before us as our basal conception of the 
Father's house. The atmosphere, the joys, 
the beauty of Jesus Christ, are the atmo- 
sphere, the joys, the beauty of Heaven. 
Every one there shall think as He thinks, 
and feel as He feels, and be holy as He is 
holy; every one shall be like Him, trans- 
formed into His image, and forever pos- 
sessed of complete peace. What it means to 
be delivered from every evil and to be free 
to every good, to be associated in closest 

94 



The Appeal to the Imagination 

friendship with Christ Himself and with all 
who have been made perfect, to find our- 
selves in circumstances where the heart has 
unlimited opportunity for happiness and 
the mind unlimited opportunity for devel- 
opment, imagination, and only imagina- 
tion, can suggest. But God wishes imagi- 
nation to suggest these delights, and to 
picture them in the most attractive forms 
that can be devised, until the hope of 
Heaven shall be a loadstone drawing us to 
God by day and by night. 

Here is hope's highest sphere. Hope is 
eminent among life's greatest blessings. 
It puts nerve into the languid and fleetness 
into the feet of exhaustion. It causes the 
sailor in times of peril to see the waiting 
arms of his wife and little children, and 
then he tries to outride the tempest and 
reach his home. It causes men to perse- 
vere through difficulties and dangers, and 
to struggle onward. Hope came to Paul, 
the prisoner, when deserted by every 
earthly friend and destined to be cruelly 
killed, and showing him a righteous God 
waiting to welcome him and place a crown 
of life upon his head, kept him brave and 
triumphant. 

So imagination takes the hope of 

95 



The Great Appeal 

Heaven, and through it calls to us to yield 
to God and let Him bring us thither. We 
do not need to know one syllable more 
about the Father*s house; what we shall do 
there, how we shall rule angels, what our 
glorified bodies will be. All such knowl- 
edge is insignificant compared to the one 
great knowledge that we shall be perfectly 
holy and perfectly happy. That one 
knowledge is given, and given in fullest 
and clearest terms. Imagination appro- 
priates that knowledge, and then pictures 
our very selves as we shall be when every 
longing is satisfied and our manhood is 
complete. The greatest, rarest, most 
beautiful conception that can be presented 
to the imagination is perfection of charac- 
ter. Thus it is that the promise of ideal 
character, in ideal surroundings, with un- 
limited opportunity for blessed expansion, 
through happy service, is the last and 
mightiest appeal the God of Omnipotence 
and Love can make to imagination to draw 
us to Himself. 



96 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

In every human being there is an instinct 
often called the instinct of self-protection. 
It prompts us to think of our own interests 
and to endeavor to secure them. It exerts 
great power in leading men to decisions; it 
causes them to ask concerning any matter 
presented to them for acceptance, '*Will 
this thing profit me?" 

This instinct is intended to be of great 
help to us. If a child knows that pain will 
result from placing his hand in the fire, 
self-interest tells him not to do so. If a 
man knows that financial ruin will result 
from a certain kind of investment, self- 
interest tells him not to enter upon it. It 
is an instinct constantly appealed to; all 
commerce is based upon it; so, too, are 
all forms of industrial effort. It is the 
instinct that is called into play in every 
counting-room, every banking office, every 
market-place of the world. To act irre- 
97 



The Great Appeal 

spective of it is to be foolish, to act respon- 
sive to it is to be wise. A proper regard 
for self-interest is not wrongful selfishness, 
but is rightful self-care. Every man 
is bound to consider his truest interests and 
to seek them. The holiest saints as well 
as the brightest angels are not blind to 
their own welfare. We can love others 
wisely only as we love ourselves. We 
must cherish the instinct that ponders what 
is helpful or harmful to us, else we cannot 
know how to secure the welfare of others. 
Every dealing of God with man has been 
upon the basis of man's self-interests. He 
would be glad to have man do right be- 
cause it is right, and shun wrong be- 
cause it is wrong. It would be pleasant if 
man would choose Him simply because He 
is perfect, and because man as soon as he 
sees Him prefers the perfect to aught else. 
But man needs an appeal to his self-inter- 
ests if he is to do what God wishes of him, 
and therefore God makes that appeal. 
When He placed man in the attractive sur- 
roundings of Eden He gave him the addi- 
tional help that came from the thought of 
his own safety, as He assured him that 
disobedience would cost him his life: **Ye 
shalt not eat the fruit, lest ye die." It 
98 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

was a favorite way with God in dealing 
with ancient Israel to make two lists: one 
of specified blessings, another of specified 
curses, and then say to Israel, **These bless- 
ings will be yours if you obey Me, and 
these curses will be yours if you disobey 
Me." He even asked attention to the fact 
that He acted in this manner, as though it 
was a kindness and a help to them to have 
Him do so: '*! call Heaven and earth 
to record this day against you, that I have 
set before you life and death, blessing and 
cursing; therefore, choose life, that both 
thou and thy seed may live/' He assured 
Peter, in whom this instinct of self-interest 
asserted itself, that the man who followed 
Him should have ''houses and lands, broth- 
ers and sisters, with persecutions, and in 
the world to come life everlasting." He 
repeatedly said that it would pay to be His 
devoted follower, and He made promise 
after promise of good gifts to all who would 
choose Him. He did not hesitate to say 
that self-denial was involved in thus choos- 
ing Him, and [that the way of His obedi- 
ence would necessitate the cross, and per- 
haps danger, and even suffering. But He 
always made the benefit and the happiness 
that would eventually result from choosing 
99 



The Great Appeal 

Him to be so great that He could say, 
'*The advantage is on the side of following 
Me." '*I will forewarn you whom ye shall 
fear; fear him who is able to destroy both 
soul and body in hell" He said to self- 
interest, that He might restrain men from 
evil. *' Whosoever shall confess Me before 
men, him will I confess also before My 
Father which is in Heaven" He said to 
self-interest, that He might draw men to 
the good. It is a matter that should stir us 
with the profoundest gratitude that, when 
we are so susceptible to temporary impulses 
and hasty emotions, God lays much 
material at the feet of self-interest, and 
thus helps us to be prudent, to count the 
cost, and to prefer the best. 

There are two main lines of appeal thus 
made by God to the self-interests, one, on 
the nature and effects of sin, the other, on 
the nature and effects of holiness. Both of 
these lines spring out of the moral govern- 
ment of God. That government He pro- 
claims to be a fact, a sure fact, and a fact 
forever. He assures us in very firm and 
very kind tones that He is God over all, 
and will never suffer wrong to go unpun- 
ished nor right to go unrewarded. He 
thus answers to a desire inborn in every 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

human creature, that there should be a 
supreme government over our earth, recog- 
nizing the good and dealing with it as it 
deserves, and recognizing also the evil and 
dealing with it as it deserves; a govern- 
ment that commands the respect of every 
intelligence at its best personal rectitude. 
It does not matter where God writes His 
laws, whether in nature or in Scripture, 
they cannot be violated with impunity. He 
who swallows poison is poisoned; he who 
jumps into Niagara is carried over the 
falls. To expose one's self in nakedness 
to great cold is to suffer; to stand in the 
way of a falling tree is to be injured. 
Nature cannot be treated with disrespect 
excepting at cost. To go contrary to her 
laws is to be punished. The man that 
pierces his eye or stabs his heart finds that 
he must suffer. Nature does not note 
whether the violation of its laws was com- 
mitted through ignorance or through 
knowledge, whether by an infant or by an 
adult; nature rebukes with penalty wrong, 
however and by whomsoever done. Sooner 
or later every affront to the ''reign of law" 
is recognized, and nature, that need not 
hurry because all time belongs to her, lays 
a heavy hand on every reckless transgres- 

lOI 



The Great Appeal 

sor. A man cannot take fire into his 
bosom without burning his clothes, nor can 
he touch pitch without being defiled, nor 
can he destroy his ears and still hear. 

But even more significant is God's moral 
government as written in the laws of 
Scripture. These laws define what God 
condemns. To violate any law of Scrip- 
ture is to imperil one's safety and one's 
happiness. It is a part of God's fixed pur- 
pose that evil shall not prosper. It is use- 
less then for any human being ever to at- 
tempt to thwart Him in that purpose. He 
hates evil; He is bound to secure its over- 
throw and its extermination. All the 
forces of the universe are at His command, 
and He will make stars, and rivers, and 
winds, and plagues do His service in thus 
conquering evil. It is foolish to fight 
against God by doing evil; nothing but de- 
feat awaits the evil-doer. Sometimes this 
has been tried. A nation has attempted 
it. Israel did. Israel heard God say 
that the nation choosing dishonesty, impur- 
ity, and irreverence would perish. God 
even said more; He told the particular 
sorrows that should come upon His own 
Israel in case Israel practiced these sins. 
"The Lord shall scatter you among all 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

people from the one end of the earth even 
unto the other end. Wherever scattered, 
you shall find no ease, neither shall the sole 
of your foot have rest. The tender and 
delicate woman among you shall eat her 
own children for want of all things, secretly 
in the siege and straitness wherewith your 
enemy shall distress you in your gates. 
You shall become an astonishment, a 
proverb, and a by-word among all nations 
whither the Lord shall lead you." 

These were words said in love, while as 
yet Israel was obedient. But Israel disre- 
garded the appeal to self-interest, so force- 
fully expressed, and hundreds of years 
later thought to do evil and escape harm. 
But the word of the Lord once spoken can- 
not be broken, and so it came to pass that 
every penalty thus predicted was realized 
by Israel; Israel was scattered from its lit- 
tle corner into every part of the earth, 
until its people could be found everywhere; 
Israel was disliked by every other nation, 
and had no rest for its foot; in the siege of 
Jerusalem by Titus, one of Israel's own 
delicate women was discovered eating in 
secret the child whose body she had boiled 
in her caldron; and to this day the Jewish 
race is an '^astonishment" constantly 
103 



The Great Appeal 

quoted with surprise, and is also a ''by- 
word" constantly mentioned with con- 
tempt. 

It never has paid for any nation to disre- 
gard the will of God. Babylon had her mes- 
sage of warning against disobedience to 
God, but Babylon paid no heed to the mes- 
sage, and she became the heap of ruins that 
was fore - announced. Nineveh, too, was 
charged to remember God's high purposes, 
else she would come to nought; but Nine- 
veh preferred her own pleasure to God's 
pleasure, and Nineveh became a desolation. 
''In 1838 the State of Georgia stole the 
lands of the Cherokee Indians, and drove 
them in midwinter across the Mississippi. 
There were sixteen thousand of them, and 
four thousand of them perished in the 
terrible journey. They were civilized; 
half of them could read; half of their 
Georgian neighbors could not read. Chief 
Ross wrote at the time: 'Years, nay cen- 
turies, may elapse before the punishment 
will follow the offense, but the volume of 
history and the sacred Bible assure us that 
the period will certainly arrive. We would 
labor to avert the wrath of Heaven from 
the United States by influencing your Gov- 
ernment to be just.' A quarter of a cen- 
104 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

tury passed, and the Cherokee lands 
became the center of the dreadful war of 
Secession. Missionary Ridge, the battle- 
ground, where so many lay dead or 
wounded, was so named because of the old 
mission station among the Indians. 
Georgia in that war lost three-quarters of 
her wealth. At the close of the war the 
United States government sent thirty thou- 
sand bushels of corn to this particular 
region to save the people from starving!" 
Nor has it ever paid for an individual to 
go contrary to God's will. Sin is a curse 
in itself. It is a disease that once received 
into the system has no self-corrective 
power; rather, it is reproductive of itself, 
so that left to itself or uneradicated, it 
increases in force and in extent. It blinds 
the eyes to the beauty of holiness, it deaf- 
ens the ears to the entreaties of God, it 
weakens the will, it brings the whole nature 
into bondage to evil. Again and again the 
punishment of sin in the individual case 
becomes patent to the eyes of the world. 
The man who digs the pit for another to 
fall into, falls into it himself. Jacob de- 
ceives his father, and then Jacob's sons 
deceive their father. David breaks up the 
home of another through his lust, and a 
105 



The Great Appeal 

little later Amnon breaks up David's home 
through similar lust. Agrippina puts her 
husband to death to enthrone her son Nero, 
and what does Nero do to hold that throne 
but put Agrippina herself to death. The 
men who originated the cruelties of the 
French Revolution themselves suffered 
those cruelties. The teaching of history 
is that men who sin are taken in their own 
sins; of all Israel's kings only eight died a 
natural death, for they were slain even as 
they slew others. Roman emperors 
mounted to power over the dead bodies of 
their rivals, and their successors stepped 
upon the very bodies of these emperors 
when they themselves came to office. The 
man who backbites is almost sure to be 
backbitten; the man who lies finds life dis- 
honest; the man who injures receives 
injuries. 

Even if outward penalty is not seen in 
connection with wrong, wrong never 
escapes penalty. When ''Spain kindled the 
fires of the auto-da-fe, and stretched vic- 
tims on the rack, those fires dried the blood 
out of her own heart, and through the crip- 
pling and mangling of others' limbs she 
herself has never been able to walk erect.'* 
When France broke her word to the Hugue- 
io6 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

nots, in which she pledged them safety, 
and having persuaded them to come to 
Paris, massacred them, she brought upon 
herself a fickleness that has been her weak- 
ness ever since. Fulk the Black, Duke of 
Anjou in the eleventh century, burned his 
wife at the stake, leading her to her doom 
dressed in her gayest attire. For fifty 
years Fulk reigned without a single mishap. 
But was it not penalty, the penalty of a 
corrupted, even a fiendish heart, that 
caused him in old age to hate his own son 
and fight him until he conquered him, and 
then caused him to bridle and saddle that 
son like a beast of burden, and make him 
crawl, thus accoutred, to his father's feet, 
while he yelled in fierce exultation, '*You 
are conquered, you are conquered!'' 

There are far worse things than those the 
outside world says of us or does toward us. 
The worst penalty any human life can carry 
is its own corrupt, wretched self. What a 
man sows that he reaps; evil produces 
evil, and there is no more fearful harvest 
that a nation or an individual can reap than 
the harvest of envies, lusts, hates, fears, 
and bitternesses. Fulk's heart was the 
worst penalty sin could bring him. A 
man's own nature is often his retribution. 
107 



The Great Appeal 

It is folly to think that penalty can be 
escaped. It is sin's shadow. At midday, 
when as yet the sobering twilight has 
brought no retrospective hour, and sin has 
not been pondered, the shadow is scarcely 
seen at sin's side. But when at cool of 
evening the voice of God is heard walking 
in the garden and asking about our deeds 
and bringing us to a consciousness of our 
disobedience, the shadow darkens and 
lengthens. No Achan, however long he 
may conceal his wrong, and however undis- 
turbed his heart may be, can forever avoid 
penalty. "All roads lead by God's judg- 
ment throne, and He is always found sit- 
ting there." Whether in time or in eter- 
nity. His law is the same; sin carries 
penalty with it. So long as sin exists, 
penalty must exist, too. An eternal sin 
necessitates an eternal sorrow. 

Thus it is that God, through the fearful 
nature' and fearful effects of sin, appeals to 
the self-interest to turn from sin to Him- 
self. **Why will ye die?" he says to men. 
He points to drunkards' homes and drunk- 
ards' graves, to the cells of penitentiaries 
and jails, to ruined reputations and ruined 
characters, and bids men see that sin does 
not pay. He calls the long list of history 
io8 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

beginning with Adam and Eve, continuing 
with Cain, moving on to Pharaoh, and Solo- 
mon, and Pilate, and Nero, and Lucretia 
Borgia, and entreats us to profit by their 
experiences and avoid their errors. He 
pleads with self-interest to remember that 
the tendency of sin is to perpetuate itself, 
and to remember, too, that character be- 
comes more and more fixed; and then by 
the thought of eternal sin, and eternal sor- 
row by reason of eternal sin, he asks self- 
interest whether it can afford to expose 
itself to such a ruin. He exhausts the 
resources of time and eternity to persuade 
self-interest to avoid evil and cling to 
Him. 

But it is not only through penalties that 
God appeals to the self-interest; He ap- 
peals to it also through rewards. He assures 
us that godliness is profitable unto all 
things, having promise of the life that now 
is and of that which is to come. He tells 
us that every virtue He asks of us has in it 
the seed of an earthly blessing. When He 
gave laws in the days of Moses, He aimed 
at health of body, health of mind, and 
health of spirit. The men of Israel who 
obeyed His hygienic rules were more free 
from disease than those who disobeyed 
109 



The Great Appeal 

them. To-day His charge is that we look 
upon our bodies as temples of the Holy 
Ghost and protect their strength and purity. 
His precepts call for self-control and calm- 
ness of judgment, and thus they minister 
to mental welfare. He constantly charges 
us to be joyful, and even makes joy a duty. 
God means to brighten and sweeten the 
hearts of all who accept His guidance, and 
put rest and refreshment into their spirits. 
Nor is there an active virtue omitted from 
His list of requirements. He summons 
men to energy, and courage, and fidelity. 
He laid before Israel the difficult under- 
taking of conquering the promised land, 
and then called upon Israel to develop all 
the manliness and bravery of which they 
were capable. He lays upon his people 
now the still more difficult undertaking of 
conquering the entire earth with righteous- 
ness, and thus calls upon them to be nobly 
self-sacrificing and devotedly heroic. 

For a nation to live God's laws is to 
practice temperance, purity, and earnest- 
ness. Thus to live is to hold a mortgage 
on prosperity. The nation that gives the 
first fruits of all its increase to Him and 
then sustains itself upon the rest is on the 
way to material well-being. Unless some 
no 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

special event like drought, pestilence, fire, 
war, or persecution comes, the nation that 
is faithful to God may expect to prosper. 
And still God does not ask us to count, 
even in national life, material success as 
His chief appeal to us. He remembers, as 
all thoughtful men must remember, that 
the glory of a nation, as of an individual, 
is in the spirit of its life ; when a nation has 
safe homes, high sense of responsibility, 
large interest in public good, then the 
nation is indeed blessed. God now directs 
our attention to what He has wrought in 
the world, bidding us compare the homes in 
which His words are best exemplified with 
homes in which they are disregarded, and 
compare, too, the communities in which 
His wishes most control with those in 
which they have no influence, and then He 
asks us, *'Is not the balance all on the side 
of God and of His will?" 

The individual who lives as God directs 
ceases to be a slave to sin and becomes a 
free man; ceases to be powerless and be- 
comes mighty to do right; ceases to be 
heavy-hearted and becomes hopeful. God 
calls the list of His representative follow- 
ers, and every one of them has admirable 
traits; Abraham has courage, Moses has 



The Great Appeal 

far-sightedness, Joshua has daring, Samuel 
has integrity, David has penitence, Jere- 
miah has loyalty, Daniel has fidelity. The 
men and women who have been inspired 
by God have had such patience, such holy 
joy, such love for others, such devotion to 
truth, that they could be destitute, afflicted, 
tormented, and even be slain by the sword, 
anci still give no sign of weakening. Such 
men and women appear in every new gen- 
eration that is affected by God's will. 
*' There was rapture in the heart of St. Ber- 
nard, St. Francis, Thomas a Kempis, Sam- 
uel Rutherford, Robert McCheyne; there 
was chivalrous loyalty in the heart of Henry 
Havelock and Charles Kingsley, Frederick 
Robertson, Charles Gordon; there was deep 
piety in the soul of David Brainerd, Henry 
Martyn, Coleridge Patteson.** 

The coldest mind sees in history God's 
great wonders. The centuries pronounce for 
God. Jehoiakim tries to cut the word of 
God into pieces and burn it up ; but neither 
he nor Decius, nor Julian the Apostate can 
destroy God's truth. God had a fullness 
of time in which He brought Christ to 
earth; never before was the world so pre- 
pared for the spread of His teachings as 
when with the Greek language everywhere 



The Appeal to the Self-interests 

intelligible, and Roman roads everywhere 
safe, the Gospel was given to the world. He 
had a fullness of time for the Reformation, 
when the discovery of the magnet, of the 
art of printing, of the telescope, and of a 
new world, and the general revival of let- 
ters and awakening of a keen spirit of 
ingenuity and enterprise opened the way for 
the rapid spread of truth. The forces that 
live and continue in human society are the 
forces of God's truth; the words that last 
and prevail are God's words; the mem- 
ories that are cherished and are most 
blessed are the memories of those who have 
been actuated by God's spirit; the joys 
that most satisfy the human heart are 
God's joys; the virtues that are to be last 
upon the stage of action and receive the 
final applause are the virtues commended 
and commanded by God. 

It pays to do God's will; pays for time 
and pays for eternity. Every soul that 
follows God here, cherishing humility and 
serving high ideals, in Heaven is received 
to Himself for recognition and fellowship. 
That soul enters upon an estate of holiness 
that is fixed. It moves on forever in lines 
of supreme enjoyment. All its tastes are 
elevated ; all its ambitions pure. High and 

113 



The Great Appeal 

noble thoughts abide within it. Every man 
who has allowed God to redeem him from 
sin is in eternity a joy to himself and a joy 
to all others. He has at command every 
pleasure and every advantage he can wish. 
Pearls are there, gold, too, and song, and 
joyous shouts. It is home for the wan- 
derer, rest for the weary, light for the 
blind, comfort for the sorrowful, trium- 
phant character for those who long fought 
with sin. Compared to these exceeding 
great and eternal glories even the severest 
sufferings of the present world are as noth- 
ing. Loyal hearts enter into and possess 
the very joy that is the joy of God. 

Side by side God thus places the bottom- 
less pit and the heights of glory. He 
makes the penalties of disobedience to His 
will as fearful as He can make them; He 
makes the rewards of obedience as attrac- 
tive as He can make them. He exhausts 
even eternity itself in His appeal to self- 
interests to choose life rather than death. 



"4 



The Appeal to the Will 

On almost every battle-field there is 
some one spot where the issue of the bat- 
tle is decided. If the army of defense 
continues to hold that spot, the defenders 
triumph; if, however, the army of attack 
secures that spot, then the attacking army 
triumphs. 

It was so at Waterloo. There was a 
farmhouse around which the battle surged 
for hours. The question was, who should 
control the part of the field where that 
farmhouse, with its buildings and walls, 
was. If the French controlled it, they 
would hold the key to the situation, and 
French troops would conquer; if the Eng- 
lish controlled it, they would inevitably 
win the day. Backward and forward went 
the battle about the farmhouse. Troops 
were massed against it. Cannon and rifle 
were directed toward it. The thought of 
two armies centered on that farmhouse. 
To possess it was to succeed. When at 
115 



The Great Appeal 

last English troops held it and held it 
firmly, English troops had won Waterloo. 

Similarly in every human being there is 
one element about which the battle of life is 
fought. It is the will. If good secures 
that will, good conquers; if evil secures 
that will, evil conquers. The whole contest 
of good and evil over our humanity is as 
to the control of the will. The will is the 
objective point of all effort to decide hu- 
man character and destiny. As goes the 
will, so goes the man — for time and for 
eternity. Character is finally a choice, and 
choice is the determination and expression 
of the will. 

The will, when it once has made its de- 
cision and become persistent, exerts great 
influence, whatever the sphere of its opera- 
tion. Douglas Jerrold was told by his 
physicians that he must die. Having suffi- 
cient clearness of mind to think, he began 
to think of his family of children who 
would be left helpless if he should leave 
them. Then he gathered all his will power 
together and resolved that he would live, if 
living were a possibility. And he did live 
for years. Such a case is not singular. 
Calhoun threw off a fever that threatened 
to keep him from an engagement to make 
ii6 



The Appeal to the Will 

a public address, as he resolved that speak 
he would. Oftentimes the will power be- 
comes a tonic to the body, arousing vitality 
and reasserting health. 

The saying has become a commonplace, 
that **all things are possible to him that 
wills.'* 

It is an exaggerated and unqualified state- 
ment of a great fact. The will can do very 
much ; it can face difficulties of every pos- 
sible kind and resolve to find a way through 
them or out of them, and often can succeed. 
Boys who have said within themselves, **I 
2£//// secure an education,'* have learned to 
read by a rushlight, have saved pennies 
enough to buy a book or two, and have be- 
come educated. Youths who were bound 
to get ahead in the world have made a path 
for themselves where the irresolute have 
said that it was utterly hopeless to try to 
advance. The man of the iron will is a 
fearful opponent; well may he be dreaded 
in war or in any business scheme. Even if 
he is baffled for the time, he soon tosses 
aside discouragement as though it were a 
feather, and he becomes all alert for new 
plans and new efforts. What seem to be 
impassable obstacles to others are to him 
only whetstones to the sharpening of his 
117 



The Great Appeal 

purpose and energy. And if the man of 
the iron will be a friend instead of an op- 
ponent, his aid is invaluable. He will 
break chains for us that were considered 
unbreakable; he will face Pharaohs, and 
continue saying "Let the people go,'* until 
he becomes a deliverer. He will open up 
a road for us where otherwise we should 
have been engulfed, and he will crown our 
lives with gladness when otherwise we 
should have sunk in despair. 

It is not true, however, that ''all things 
are possible to him who wills." The diffi- 
culty with the saying is in the word "all.'' 
That word is too inclusive. Many things — 
yes, many more things than men think or 
dream of — are possible to him that wills, 
but not "all things." Will as he may, 
Methusaleh cannot live forever. Death 
may by a resolve be kept off from us for 
many years, but not for all years. Weak- 
ness at last conquers, and the man who 
would not succumb lies upon his bed with 
no power whatever over his life. Alexan- 
der once would not listen to the idea of 
"impossible"; it irritated him. But the 
Alexanders, Napoleons, Bismarcks, always 
find that there are some circumstances 
before which they are utterly powerless, 
ii8 



The Appeal to the Will 

and their wills become like weather vanes 
that flutter with the wind and do not direct 
the wind. We cannot by will power every 
time bring the ship in safety to harbor, 
nor win in contests, nor prosper in busi- 
ness. 

And still there is one sphere of life where 
the will is all-decisive. It chooses good or 
evil just as it pleases. In that sphere, the 
sphere of moral choices, its realm is abso- 
lutely sovereign and unquestionable. The 
will cannot decide where a person's infancy 
shall be passed — in America or Asia; 
whether his skin shall be black or white ; 
whether he shall have wealth, power, prom- 
inence, genius. But it can decide whether 
he shall follow the true or the untrue, 
whether he shall make the good his ideal 
or the evil his ideal. It can decide on his 
motives, his purposes, his controlling am- 
bitions ; it can decide the trend of his being, 
and can cause his inmost thought — that 
which remains written forever on his spirit 
when heart and flesh fail — to be either to- 
ward God or away from God. 

In this sphere of its actions the will is 

supreme. No man nor set of men can 

coerce the will of another; God never even 

thinks of coercing the will of a human 

119 



The Great Appeal 

being. Man often tries coercion. He cre- 
ates an inquisition; he places thumb-screws 
on people; he tortures them to accept his 
faith, his ideas. But with God the value 
of choice is in its freedom. Mere outward 
expression of accepting Him and calling 
him *'Lord, Lord!'' is valueless to Him. 
Unless the will itself, unforced, has chosen 
Him, the will is not His, and the soul of 
man has not given Him a free, loyal alle- 
giance. God therefore appeals to the will 
through persuasions, and only through 
persuasions. But He concentrates all His 
thought, and finally all His effort, of bring- 
ing man into this allegiance to Himself 
upon those persuasions to man's will. 

His first appeal to the will is on the basis 
of the will's privilege. It may choose life 
or it may choose death, just as it prefers. 
It is like a bird in the air, free to move 
whithersoever it wishes. God constantly 
reminds the will of the inestimable privi- 
lege it thus possesses. He assures every 
living soul that no person, nor any combi- 
nation of circumstances, can make that 
soul evil if the soul does not choose to be 
evil. Neither death, nor life, nor angels, 
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things 
present, nor things to come, nor height, 
1 20 



The Appeal to the Will 

nor depth, nor any other creature can sepa- 
rate a soul from God's love if that soul de- 
sires God's love. Bad parents, bad teach- 
ers, bad companions, even persecutors, do 
not have it in their power to compel a soul 
to obey their bidding. Yes, the will's priv- 
ilege is great; it exalts the value of man- 
hood; it gives it a range of opportunity 
that is as high as Heaven and as low as 
hell. Every moral choice is before it for 
its consideration. Planets cannot wander 
from their courses; man can. Man can 
resist the Almighty, acting contrary to all 
the expressed wishes of God; or man can 
yield to the wishes of God and put himself in 
harmony with eternal and blessed purposes. 
That we may realize what the privilege 
of the will is, God reminds us that He cre- 
ated us. In our creation He made a won- 
derful display of His power. When He 
called the earth and its inhabitants into 
being, man was the crowning object of cre- 
ation. Thus making man He made him 
for a special purpose, that purpose being 
that man might answer to the divine will, 
and be God's companion and friend. Even 
with this definite and distinct purpose in 
mind, a purpose that called forth the su- 
preme counsel of God as He brought man 



The Great Appeal 

into existence, a purpose that sprang from 
a heart that longed for fellowship, still God 
left man's moral choice free — and man 
could vitiate the very end God had in view 
in creating him, if man pleased! 

That same purpose animates God in all 
the work of His providential care over us. 
He sends night and day, springtime and 
harvest; He sends all His bounties and all 
His deprivations to draw our souls into 
sympathy with His own. His eye is never 
off us, His heart is never asleep toward us, 
His arm is never relaxed from us — and all 
because He wishes that His loving kindness 
might lead us to repentance and His deeds 
of love might persuade our wills to draw 
nigh to Him. And still He never breaks 
down the door of the will and enters in 
opposition to our choice. He simply stands 
at the door and knocks, and though He 
hungers to come in and be one with us in 
fellowship, He so respects our will that He 
continues knocking, as a suppliant, though 
He has fed us all our life long. Thus we 
may treat the King of Bounty as though 
He were an unworthy beggar to whom we 
disdainfully deny even a crust! 

That same purpose animates God in all 
the work of our redemption. He wished 
12^ 



The Appeal to the Will 

to have His children come home and be 
forever safe and happy with Him. To that 
end He gave up the treasure of His heart, 
that which lay within His very bosom, and 
He surrendered His Son to every experience 
of peril, pain, and death, so that man might 
know the height, and depth, and length, and 
breadth of His love for man, and might be 
won away from sin to Himself. He told 
the story of the father's yearning for the 
return of the prodigal, and the story, too, 
of the father's entreaty of the elder brother 
to be a sweet-hearted man. He made the 
outstretched arms of the Christ on the 
cross the picture of His own outstretched 
arms of love for mankind; and then He 
sent forth His heralds, inspired by the 
Holy Ghost Himself, to plead — yes, to 
plead, and plead again and again — with 
human hearts to let God's love enter and 
fill them. And still. Creator, Provider, 
Redeemer as God is, God never forces the 
human will to do His bidding. Rather, He 
says to the will: ''Behold your privilege! 
I have made you free, but I have made you 
free that you might of yourself choose Me. 
Surely, I who have thus honored you, and 
whose love and blessedness you know, am 
the One for you to choose!" 
123 



The Great Appeal 

God's second appeal to the will is on the 
basis of the wilTs responsibility. The will is 
under necessity of making moral decisions; 
it cannot avoid or escape them. A man's 
choices of good or evil are finally his own. 
Herein lies his individuality. The best 
father in the world cannot direct his son's 
will. It was not President Burr of Prince- 
ton College, nor President Burr's wife, the 
saintly daughter of Jonathan Edwards, 
that made their son, Aaron Burr; he made 
himself. They could not make him. They 
could advise, caution, plead; but it was 
Aaron Burr on whom at last, when all their 
words were finished, rested the responsibil- 
ity of determining whether he would accept 
or reject their words. Fathers, teachers, 
pastors, cannot shape the moral career of 
another; he may not think that they can, 
nor may he charge them with so doing. 
Moral careers are the expression of pure 
self-choice. Responsibility for them cannot 
be evaded. Pilate may wash his hands, and 
listen while the people say of his deed, 
'*We assume responsibility for it." But 
while they carried their own responsibility 
for what they did, Pilate carried his re- 
sponsibility for what he did, and no voice, 
though it were persuasive as an arch- 
124 



The Appeal to the Will 

angel's, could release him from that re- 
sponsibility. 

It is a very sobering fact that character 
and destiny thus become a necessary self- 
choice. The privilege of a free will entails 
the greatest responsibility that man can 
imagine for himself ; he must — whether he is 
glad or sorry to do so — make decisions that 
involve and determine his eternal interests 
for weal or woe. He is placed in a posi- 
tion from which he cannot extricate himself 
without a positive choice of good or evil. 
This position is one in which he finds him- 
self every time a decision between right 
and wrong is before his mind. Each time 
a decision for right is made, a trend of will 
is created toward the right; and each time 
a decision for wrong is made, a trend of 
will is created toward the wrong. Indeci- 
sion can, in the very nature of things, be 
but brief; all people, like Pilate, find that 
they must say yes or no, and eventually 
take a side. Moral questions admit of no 
neutrality; we must either side with or side 
against what is known to us to be right. 
Harlan Page said to a band of young men 
and young women who in their hearts be- 
lieved Jesus Christ to be their rightful lord, 
"Shall I put you down as for Christ or 
125 



The Great Appeal 

against Christ?" and with a note-book he 
went to each that their names might be 
placed as they chose, on the page *'for" or 
on the page "against," Christ. Sooner or 
later moral decisions are forced home upon 
us. Even when we think we have made no 
positive decisions, oftentimes we have 
yielded to influences that speedily carry us 
toward or away from the right, and ten- 
dency indicates choice. 

Nor does God state merely the respon- 
sibility of the will to make moral choices; 
He states also its responsibility to choose 
what it knows to be best. The will, to 
God, is more than the pilot's hand which 
holds the wheel and so keeps the vessel in a 
defined course. The will, to Him, is a 
moral creature, capable of knowledge and 
having a character of its own. The will is 
the pilot himself, with eyes, and ears, and 
brain, who has indeed a directing hand, but 
who has also a directing spirit back of that 
hand, whose duty it is to see that the hand 
steers the vessel in the safe course. The 
will is not blind; it knows where rocks are 
and where safe waters are, where evil lies 
and where good lies. The will has a moral 
nature ; it can see the good and can recog- 



126 



iThe Appeal to the Will 

nize the good. Therefore it is that God 
lays before the will its responsibility to 
make choices of the good, and pleads with 
the will to be faithful to its momentous 
position and ally itself once and forever 
with Him. 

God's third appeal to the will is on the 
basis of the wilTs welfare, Man was made 
for God, and when man is in harmony with 
God he succeeds; when he is out of har- 
mony with God he fails. Machinery moves 
jarringly when the piece within it that was 
designed for one place has slipped from its 
place, and it moves smoothly when every 
piece is in its own place and answers to the 
wish of its deviser. It is folly to go con- 
trary to God's will. Even though God 
leaves every man's will free, still God 
has everlasting purposes of His own, that 
existed prior to man's birth and will exist 
always. Those purposes are, in part, that 
right shall always conquer, and wrong 
shall always be defeated. Those purposes 
pervade air, water, wind, society, govern- 
ment. The stars in their courses fight 
against the man who resists those purposes 
of God. The universe is against the evil- 
doer. No one can prosper that wills contrary 



127 



The Great Appeal 

to God's will. As well might the child expect 
to hold back the sun from its rising as the 
human will expect to permanently obstruct 
the will of God. The human will may, if it 
please, strive against God; it may raise a 
clenched fist toward Heaven and defy God; 
it may violate every known good and may 
make evil its god. But it will be in vain. 
The man that runs against God's will runs 
against the order of the universe. We only 
destroy ourselves when we act counter to 
God. * 'Whosoever shall fall on this stone 
shall be broken; but upon whomsoever it 
shall fall it shall grind him to powder." 

But when the will of man acts in the line 
of God's will, then there is security. He 
who yields to God yields to Him who is 
absolutely good and whose kingdom knows 
no end. We put ourselves into the keeping 
of the Omnipotent and Eternal when we let 
God take us to His arms and heart. For 
us thenceforward the stars will shine, and 
the rivers flow, and the angels sing. All 
things will work together for our good. 
Life's harmony will be found. 

** God's will is like a cliff of stone, 
My will is like the sea: 
Each murmuring thought is only thrown 
Tenderly back to me. 
128 



The Appeal to the Will 

"God's will and mine are one this day, 
And evermore shall be; 
There is a calm in life's tossed bay, 
And the waves sleep quietly." 

And even more than this; to the will 
that yields to God's will, God gives helpful 
strength. God corrects its faults, and 
heals its diseases, and succors its weak- 
nesses. The will that was obstinate and 
rebellious He promises to make meek and 
gentle, while the will that was impulsive 
and insecure He promises to make wise and 
steadfast. Thus He appeals to every will 
to let Him guide it, beautify it, bless it, 
until — and this is the consummation — the 
will has become perfect, even like unto His 
own holy will, and every choice — yes, and 
every preference — is for the highest and 
the best. 

Here, then, God leaves His appeal. He 
closes His Bible with a last word of invita- 
tion, and that word is, '* Whosoever wi'/llet 
him take of the water of life freely." 
Every persuasion that He has made to the 
intellect, the heart, the conscience, the 
memory, the imagination, the self-inter- 
ests, has been directed toward the will. 
Yes, it is with the will that rests the priv- 
129 



The Great Appeal 

ilege and the responsibility of answering 
to the Divine desire and deciding eternal 
welfare. All the persuasions of God at 
last concentrate in the one brief question, 
''Are you willing to be mine?" 

As God puts that final, all-comprehensive, 
eternally-decisive question, men and angels 
watch with eager hearts to see how it will 
be answered. There comes a time when 
God can say or do no more, when even He 
has exhausted every possible persuasion, 
and when the individual whom He would 
win must be left entirely to himself and to 
the voices God has sounded in his being. 
That time is the crisis in one's existence. 

Some persons have been obliged to strug- 
gle hard with selfishness and sin before they 
could say to God, ' * I yield my life to Thee. ' ' 
It has cost some the surrender of their 
homes, their parents, their property; it has 
meant to some a wrench that they long 
remembered, as they broke away from evil 
habits and hurtful companions; it has been 
to some the giving up of their ambitions, 
and even of their chosen pursuits; while 
still others have gone to God as quietly as 
the little child who said, *'I heard God ask- 
ing me to come to Him, and I went to Him 
just as I go to my mother." 
130 



The Appeal to the Will 

Whether it be easy or be difficult to 
choose God is a minor matter. The su- 
preme matter is that we actually do choose 
Him. Whosoever so chooses Him, letting 
the Divine desire have its wish, answers to 
the highest possibility of his being, and 
makes himself one with Him whose care, 
and love, and blessedness never fail. 



131 



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